John Stuart Mill said that the logical development of human knowledge is the opposite of its historical development. Logically, we should begin with a definition of what we are talking about, state its fundamental premises, and then deduce corollaries in successively more specific areas. Historically, however, we are much more likely to begin with isolated specifics that interest us for one reason or another, eventually begin to see parallels between them and some other specifics, start to group these together, then discover the fundamental premises that underlie them all, and finally give it all a name. Thus mankind may start off with herbal remedies for sickness and with mixing other substances for other purposes, and eventually end up with chemistry.
Logically, The Fatal Conceit should have been the first of Friedrich A. Hayek's books, for in it he lays the foundation of much that is found in his other works—his general theory of man and human interactions and of the intellectual perceptions and misperceptions of these interactions. Once having understood Professor Hayek's underlying assumptions, we could then move on to better understand such general studies of Western government as his Law, Legislation, and Liberty and afterwards such more specific works as The Constitution of Liberty and The Road to Serfdom. On the economic side, we could proceed from Hayek's general writings on the role of knowledge to his earlier, more specific technical work on capital. However, it would have been completely inconsistent with his own overall vision for Professor Hayek to have proceeded in this mechanistically rationalistic way.
As it is, we can simply welcome this fuller development of the premises inherent in the many works that constitute the Hayekian legacy. Moreover, we have a special reason to welcome it, as it is chronologically the first book to appear in a projected series to be called The Collected Works of F.A. Hayek—though it is numbered Volume 12, Part 1.
The Fatal Conceit contains nothing startlingly new and yet my copy is heavily marked up on almost every page. For those already familiar with Hayek, it is a work of clarification. For those unfamiliar with his writings, it is an excellent introduction, not only to his thought but also to the opposite views which give the book its title. Certainly, if one were teaching a course on Hayek, The Fatal Conceit would be the perfect first assignment.
Not all libertarians will welcome Professor Hayek's clarification of his premises. The "reason" which is so important to some libertarians—even to the point of naming a magazine for it—has a very limited role in Hayek. Indeed, that limitation is a central part of his thesis that evolved patterns of human interactions are usually superior to deliberate designs imposed by "reason." The superiority of capitalism to socialism is only a special case of this broader principle.
Many libertarians would argue that there are explicit analytical reasons why capitalism is preferable to socialism and that it is for these explicit reasons that they prefer it. Otherwise, as a writer in a recent issue of The Cato Journal expressed it, it would be necessary to agree with Ronald Dworkin's characterization of belief in evolved orders as "a silly faith." However, the dichotomy between faith and reason omits the basis for many—probably most—decisions.
Someone may prefer one brand of shoe over another, not because he has blind faith or because he has rationalistically investigated the complexities of shoe construction or the anatomy of the human foot, but simply because one brand feels more comfortable than the other. Similarly, long before Austrian economics or even Adam Smith explained the superiority of market forces over politically imposed economic policies, one could (not unreasonably) have preferred the marketplace simply because of its demonstrably better results.
Hayek's transcendence of the faith-reason dichotomy goes beyond empirically based choices. He argues that the evolutionary survival of some cultural patterns at the expense of competing cultures is an important mechanism for the selection of patterns that work better—even when the reasons why they work better have not been understood by either the winners or the losers in the competition. To discard whatever cannot justify itself before the bar of reason—in the explicitly articulated sense of the philosophic rationalist—would be to throw away most of civilization itself, not just the marketplace. The "fatal conceit" of what Hayek calls "hubristic reason" is fatal in just this sense.
Repeatedly, Hayek makes clear that what he sees at stake in these apparently arcane methodological issues is nothing less than the survival of civilization. The moral glue that makes it all stick together cannot be justified—or, more important, perpetuated—on the basis of articulated, syllogistic rationality of the sort demanded by intellectuals. He says: "The starting point for my endeavor might well be David Hume's insight that 'the rules of morality…are not conclusions of our reason.'" Morals, according to Hayek, "are not a creation of man's reason but a distinct second endowment conferred on him by cultural evolution."
Hayek relies heavily on tradition—"that which lies between instinct and reason"—to preserve civilization. But he also recognizes that there are limits to such reliance on tradition, just as there are limits to the domain of explicitly articulated rationality. He says: "I do not claim that the results of group selection of traditions are necessarily 'good'—any more than I claim that other things that have survived in the course of evolution, such as cockroaches, have moral value." What he does believe is that "an understanding of cultural evolution will indeed tend to shift the benefit of the doubt to established rules, and to place the burden of proof on those wishing to change them."
One reason why no particular system of morality is deemed to be categorically and timelessly "good" by Hayek is that the kind of morality most conducive to the well-being of small communities such as families and tribes is radically different from the kind of morality needed to preserve vastly larger aggregations, such as nation-states and civilizations. He argues that the former are instinctively more attractive to us, not only because of deep roots in our ancestral past, but also because of their continuing importance in our dealings with those who are nearest and dearest to us.
The instincts of "solidarity and altruism," the sense of cooperation and consensus, the commonality of specific goals and of the efforts to achieve them, are at the heart of the small group. But the large nation-state or a vast civilization cannot be coordinated in this way. Hayek therefore sees socialistic movements, which tend to think of themselves as being in the vanguard of progress, as being instead a throwback to a more primitive society whose emotional appeal is still with us. He says: "I believe that an atavistic longing after the life of the noble savage is the main source of the collectivist tradition."
The vast civilizations now necessary, not only for our current levels of well-being but even for the physical survival of the huge populations its productivity makes possible, run on entirely different principles, of which the marketplace is only one. Fundamentally, such an "extended order," as Hayek calls it, runs on rules—rules within which individuals largely selfishly seek their radically differing goals. Such a pattern of human interactions can "give little satisfaction to deep-seated 'altruistic' desires to do visible good," according to Hayek. Its benefits, though many, are largely systemic and therefore emotionally unsatisfying to those who want to see themselves "make a difference" in the lives of others.
Hayek was once charged by Joseph A. Schumpeter with excessive generosity to his adversaries—an indictment to which few intellectuals have been subject. However, while Hayek recognizes the cynical manipulation of words and emotions for political purposes by those on the left, such phenomena are not essential to his critique of their position. According to Hayek, "The higher we climb up the ladder of intelligence, the more we talk with intellectuals, the more likely we are to encounter socialist convictions." This is because "intelligent people will tend to over-value intelligence, and to suppose that we must owe all the advantages and opportunities that our civilization offers to deliberate design rather than to following traditional rules." To Hayek, socialists are just a special case of the fatal conceit of rationalists. "Although this is an error, it is a noble one," he says.
Perhaps. But Hayek's conception is a nobler one. It accepts our limitations and all that they imply, including a self-denying discipline in place of the self-indulgent moral one-upmanship of the left.
Thomas Sowell, a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, is the author of numerous books, including most recently A Conflict of Visions and Compassion Versus Guilt.
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]]>This is the finest book on Hispanics in America that I have ever seen—or ever expect to see. Other writers are no doubt capable of the same scholarship, and some undoubtedly have longer years of study of the subject than Gann and Duignan, who have made their reputation with books on Africa. What is so rare about this book is the freshness and openness with which the authors approach the subject, and their ability to set it in a larger historical and international context.
Perhaps the best way to summarily characterize The Hispanics in the United States is that it is three-dimensional. The peoples discussed in its pages are never the two-dimensional, cardboard cut-outs all too common in books preoccupied with proving some theme—whether that theme be filiopietistic, victimology, ideology, or some intellectual "model," quantitative or otherwise. Gann and Duignan write about flesh-and-blood people, in a way which suggests throughout that their story is important in and of itself and that we will all be better off for understanding it. It is not anecdotal, but neither is it abstract. Cultural, historical, political, and economic dimensions are all given their due.
The term Hispanic in the title is one of convenience only, for the book itself treats Mexicans, Puerto Ricans, Cubans, Dominicans, and others as separate groups with very different histories abroad and very different experiences in the United States. As the authors point out: "Puerto Ricans or Mexican Americans had not originally defined themselves as 'Hispanics'; Congress had not legislated the new ethnic definition; it came only by administrative fiat."
Yet points of similarity as well as difference between the various Hispanic groups are explored. Indeed, the experiences of Hispanics are put in perspective, not only by comparisons with the experiences of contemporary blacks and whites, and with those of European immigrants to America before them, but also at times with experiences of various groups in Algeria, Sweden, or Rhodesia. All of this is done deftly and where appropriate, not as part of some overarching Weltanschauung.
There is no dramatic "Gann-Duignan thesis" the reader will take away from this book comparable to the "Turner frontier thesis" or more recent fads about "role models," "self-fulfilling prophecies," and the like. This is not a book with a formula for encapsulating history or a panacea for social ills. It is a book of insights and sense, not rhetorical fireworks or intellectual or moral exhibitionism. The reader will come away from this book with a deeper understanding of Hispanics in America, not a sense of how clever Gann and Duignan are.
Although Hispanics in the United States is chock full of historical facts, statistical data, and economic, political, and sociological analysis, there is no sense of "cramming," no jargon, and the writing is almost conversational in its ease. With the media's addiction to labels, this will almost certainly be called a "conservative" book. However, the authors reject a number of conservative theses. For example, they deal sympathetically—though not uncritically so—with bilingual education. More important, this is a book where opposing views are explored, not simply embraced or dismissed. It is these explorations which are valuable, even to those who may disagree with the authors' conclusions. This is, after all—as the subtitle says—a history.
It is not history meant to startle professional historians with newly unearthed revelations or a spectacular theory tying it all together. The authors themselves describe it as "a synthesis based on secondary sources" and "personal interviews and visits." What is remarkable about this book is not the input but the output. It sets contemporary problems in a historical context and illuminates both the past and the present for a general audience. Scholars can no doubt learn much from it as well, if they are willing.
Thomas Sowell, a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, is the author of Race and Economics, Conflict of Visions, and other works.
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]]>Social visions differ in their basic conceptions of the nature of man. A creature from another planet who sought information about human beings from reading William Godwin's Enquiry Concerning Political Justice in 1793 would hardly recognize man, as he appears there, as the same being who was described in The Federalist Papers just five years earlier. The contrast would be only slightly less if he compared man as he appeared in Thomas Paine and Edmund Burke, or today in John Kenneth Galbraith and in Friedrich A. Hayek. Even the speculative prehistory of man as a wild creature in nature differs drastically between the free, innocent being conceived by Jean Jacques Rousseau and the brutal participant in the bloody war of each against all conceived by Thomas Hobbes.
The capacities and limitations of man are implicitly seen in radically different terms by those whose explicit philosophical, political, or social theories are built on different visions. Man's moral and mental natures are seen so differently that their respective concepts of knowledge and of institutions necessarily differ as well. Social causation itself is conceived differently, both as to mechanics and results. Time and its ancillary phenomena—traditions, contracts, economic speculation, for example—are also viewed as more real by followers of some visions than by followers of opposing visions. Finally, those who believe in some visions view themselves in a very different moral role from the way followers of other visions view themselves. The ramifications of these conflicting visions extend into economic, judicial, military, philosophical, and political decisions.
Rather than attempt the impossible task of following all these ramifications in each of the myriad of social visions, the discussion here will group these visions into two broad categories—the constrained vision and the unconstrained vision. These will be abstractions of convenience, recognizing that there are degrees in both visions, that a continuum has been dichotomized, that in the real world there are often elements of each inconsistently grafted on to the other, and innumerable combinations and permutations. With all of these caveats, it is now possible to turn to an outline of the two visions, and specifics on the nature of man, the nature of knowledge, and the nature of social processes, as seen in constrained and unconstrained visions.
Adam Smith provided a picture of man which may help make concrete the nature of a constrained vision. Writing as a philosopher in 1759, nearly twenty years before he became famous as an economist, Smith said in his Theory of Moral Sentiments:
"Let us suppose that the great empire of China, with all its myriads of inhabitants, was suddenly swallowed up by an earthquake, and let us consider how a man of humanity in Europe, who had no sort of connection with that part of the world, would react upon receiving intelligence of this dreadful calamity. He would, I imagine, first of all express very strongly his sorrow for the misfortune of that unhappy people, he would make many melancholy reflections upon the precariousness of human life, and the vanity of all the labours of man, which could thus be annihilated in a moment. He would, too, perhaps, if he was a man of speculation, enter into many reasonings concerning the effects which this disaster might produce upon the commerce of Europe, and the trade and business of the world in general. And when all this fine philosophy was over, when all these humane sentiments had been once fairly expressed, he would pursue his business or his pleasure, take his repose or his diversion, with the same ease and tranquility as if no such accident had happened.
The most frivolous disaster which could befall himself would occasion a more real disturbance. If he was to lose his little finger tomorrow, he would not sleep tonight; but, provided he never saw them, he would snore with the most profound security over the ruin of a hundred million of his brethren.…"
The moral limitations of man in general, and his egocentricity in particular, were neither lamented by Smith nor regarded as things to be changed. They were treated as inherent facts of life, the basic constraint in his vision. The fundamental moral and social challenge was to make the best of the possibilities which existed within that constraint, rather than dissipate energies in an attempt to change human nature—an attempt that Smith treated as both vain and pointless. For example, if it were somehow possible to make the European feel poignantly the full pain of those who suffered in China, this state of mind would be "perfectly useless," according to Smith, except to make him "miserable," without being of any benefit to the Chinese. Smith said: "Nature, it seems, when she loaded us with our own sorrows, thought that they were enough and therefore did not command us to take any further share in those of others, than what was necessary to prompt us to relieve them."
Instead of regarding man's nature as something that could or should be changed, Smith attempted to determine how the moral and social benefits desired could be produced in the most efficient way, within that constraint. Smith approached the production and distribution of moral behavior in much the same way he would later approach the production and distribution of material goods. Although he was a professor of moral philosophy, his thought processes were already those of an economist. However, the constrained vision is by no means limited to economists. Smith's contemporary in politics, Edmund Burke, perhaps best summarized the constrained vision from a political perspective when he spoke of "a radical infirmity in all human contrivances," an infirmity inherent in the fundamental nature of things. Similar views were expressed by Alexander Hamilton, principal author of The Federalist Papers: "It is the lot of all human institutions, even those of the most perfect kind, to have defects as well as excellencies—ill as well as good propensities. This results from the imperfection of the Institutor, Man."
Clearly, a society cannot function humanely, if at all, when each person acts as if his little finger is more important than the lives of a hundred million other human beings. But the crucial word here is act. We cannot "prefer ourselves so shamelessly and blindly to others" when we act, Smith said, even if that is the spontaneous or natural inclination of our feelings. In practice, people on many occasions "sacrifice their own interests to the greater interests of others," according to Smith, but this was due to such intervening factors as devotion to moral principles, to concepts of honor and nobility, rather than to loving one's neighbor as oneself. Through such artificial devices, man could be persuaded to do for his own self-image or inner needs what he would not do for the good of his fellow man. In short, such concepts were seen by Smith as the most efficient way to get the moral job done at the lowest psychic cost. Despite the fact that this was a moral question, Smith's answer was essentially economic—a system of moral incentives, a set of trade-offs rather than a real solution by changing man. One of the hallmarks of the constrained vision is that it deals in trade-offs rather than solutions.
In his classic work, The Wealth of Nations, Smith went further. Economic benefits to society were largely unintended by individuals, but emerged systemically from the interactions of the marketplace, under the pressures of competition and the incentives of individual gain. Moral sentiments were necessary only for shaping the general framework of laws within which this systemic process could go on.
This was yet another way in which man, with all the limitations conceived by Smith, could be induced to produce benefits for others, for reasons ultimately reducible to self-interest. It was not an atomistic theory that individual self-interests added up to the interest of society. On the contrary, the functioning of the economy and society required each individual to do things for other people; it was simply the motivation behind these acts—whether moral or economic—which was ultimately self-centered. In both his moral and his economic analyses, Smith relied on incentives rather than dispositions to get the job done.
Perhaps no other eighteenth century book presents such a contrast to the vision of man in Adam Smith as William Godwin's Enquiry Concerning Political Justice, a work as remarkable for its fate as its contents. An immediate success upon its publication in England in 1793, within a decade it encountered the chilling effect of British hostile reactions to ideas popularly associated with the French Revolution, especially after France became an enemy in war. By the time two decades of warfare between the two countries were ended at Waterloo, Godwin and his work had been relegated to the periphery of intellectual life, and he was subsequently best known for his influence on Shelley. Yet no work of the eighteenth century "age of reason" so clearly, so consistently, and so systematically elaborated the unconstrained vision of man as did Godwin's treatise.
Where in Adam Smith moral or socially beneficial behavior could be evoked from man only by incentives, in William Godwin man's understanding and disposition were capable of intentionally creating social benefits. Godwin regarded the intention to benefit others as being "of the essence of virtue," and virtue in turn as being the road to human happiness . Unintentional social benefits were treated by Godwin as scarcely worthy of notice. His was the unconstrained vision of human nature, in which man was capable of directly feeling other people's needs as more important than his own, and therefore of consistently acting impartially, even when his own interests or those of his family were involved. This was not meant as an empirical generalization about the way most people currently behaved. It was meant as a statement of the underlying nature of human potential. Conceding current egocentric behavior did not imply that it was a permanent feature of human nature, as human nature was conceived in the unconstrained vision. Godwin said: "Men are capable no doubt, of preferring an inferior interest of their own to a superior interest of others; but this preference arises from a combination of circumstances and is not the necessary and invariable law of our nature."
Socially contrived incentives were disdained by Godwin as unworthy and unnecessary expedients, when it was possible to achieve directly what Smith's incentives were designed to achieve indirectly: "If a thousand men are to be benefited, I ought to recollect that I am only an atom in comparison, and to reason accordingly." Unlike Smith, who regarded human selfishness as a given, Godwin regarded it as being promoted by the very system of rewards used to cope with it. The real solution toward which efforts should be bent was to have people do what is right because it is right, not because of psychic or economic payments—that is, not because someone "has annexed to it a great weight of self-interest."
Having an unconstrained vision of the yet untapped moral potential of human beings, Godwin was not preoccupied like Smith with what is the most immediately effective incentive under the current state of things. The real goal was the long run development of a higher sense of social duty. To the extent that immediately effective incentives retarded that long run development, their benefits were illusory. The "hope of reward" and "fear of punishment" were, in Godwin's vision, "wrong in themselves" and "inimical to the improvement of the mind." In this, Godwin was seconded by another contemporary exemplar of the unconstrained vision, the Marquis de Condorcet, who rejected the whole idea of "turning prejudices and vices to good account rather than trying to dispel or repress them." Such "mistakes" Condorcet traced to his adversaries' vision of human nature—their confusing "the natural man" and his potential with existing man, "corrupted by prejudices, artificial passions and social customs."
Prudence—the careful weighing of trade-offs—is seen in very different terms within the constrained and the unconstrained visions. In the constrained vision, where trade-offs are all that we can hope for, prudence is among the highest duties. Edmund Burke called it "the first of all virtues." "Nothing is good," Burke said, "but in proportion, and with reference"—in short, as a trade-off. By contrast, in the unconstrained vision, where moral improvement has no fixed limit, prudence is of a lower order of importance. Godwin had little use for "those moralists"—quite conceivably meaning Smith—"who think only of stimulating men to good deeds by considerations of frigid prudence and mercenary self-interests," instead of seeking to stimulate the "generous and magnanimous sentiment of our natures."
Implicit in the unconstrained vision is the notion that the potential is very different from the actual, and that means exist to improve human nature toward its potential, or that such means can be evolved or discovered, so that man will do the right thing for the right reason, rather than for ulterior psychic or economic rewards. Condorcet expressed a similar vision when he declared that man can eventually "fulfill by a natural inclination the same duties which today cost him effort and sacrifice." Thus a solution can supersede mere trade-offs.
Man is, in short, "perfectible"—meaning continually improvable rather than capable of actually reaching absolute perfection. "We can come nearer and nearer," according to Godwin, though one "cannot prescribe limits" to this process. It is sufficient for his purpose that men are "eminently capable of justice and virtue"—not only isolated individuals, but "the whole species." Efforts must be made to "wake the sleeping virtues of mankind." Rewarding existing behavior patterns was seen as antithetical to this goal.
Here, too, Condorcet reached similar conclusions. The "perfectibility of man," he said, was "truly indefinite." "The progress of the human mind" was a recurring theme in Condorcet. He acknowledged that there were "limits of man's intelligence," that no one believed it possible for man to know "all the facts of nature" or to "attain the ultimate means of precision" in their measurement or analysis. But while there was ultimately a limit to man's mental capability, according to Condorcet, no one could specify what it was. He was indignant that Locke "dared to set a limit to human understanding." As a devotee of mathematics, Condorcet conceived perfectibility as a never ending asymptotic approach to a mathematical limit.
While the use of the word "perfectibility" has faded away over the centuries, the concept has survived, largely intact, to the present time. The notion that "the human being is highly plastic material" is still central among many contemporary thinkers who share the unconstrained vision. The concept of "solution" remains central to this vision. A solution is achieved when it is no longer necessary to make a trade-off, even if the development of that solution entailed costs now past. The goal of achieving a solution is in fact what justifies the initial sacrifices or transitional conditions which might otherwise be considered unacceptable. Condorcet, for example, anticipated the eventual "reconciliation, the identification, of the interests of each with the interests of all"—at which point, "the path of virtue is no longer arduous." Man could act under the influence of a socially beneficial disposition, rather than simply in response to ulterior incentives.
Human actions were dichotomized by Godwin into the beneficial and the harmful, and each of these in turn was dichotomized into the intentional and the unintentional. The intentional creation of benefits was called "virtue," and the intentional creation of harm was "negligence," a subspecies of vice. These definitions can be represented schematically:
The missing category was unintentional benefit. It was precisely this missing category in Godwin that was central to Adam Smith's whole vision, particularly as it unfolded in his classic work The Wealth of Nations. The economic benefits to society produced by the capitalist were, according to Smith, "no part of his intention." The capitalist's intentions were characterized by Smith as "mean rapacity" and capitalists as a group were referred to as people who "seldom meet together, even for merriment or diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices."
Yet, despite his repeatedly negative depictions of capitalists, unrivaled among economists until Karl Marx, Adam Smith nevertheless became the patron saint of laissez-faire capitalism. Intentions, which were crucial in the unconstrained vision of Godwin, were irrelevant in the constrained vision of Smith. What mattered to Smith were the systemic characteristics of a competitive economy, which produced social benefits from unsavory individual intentions.
While Adam Smith and William Godwin have been cited as especially clear and straightforward writers espousing opposing visions, each is part of a vast tradition that continues powerful and contending for domination today. Even among their contemporaries, Smith and Godwin each had many intellectual compatriots with similar visions, differently expressed and differing in details and degree. Edmund Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France in 1790 was perhaps the most ringing polemical application of the constrained vision. Thomas Paine's equally polemical reply, The Rights of Man (1791), anticipated in many ways the more systematic unfolding of the unconstrained vision by Godwin two years later. Rousseau was perhaps the most famous of those who argued on the basis of a human nature not inherently constrained to its existing limitations, but narrowed and corrupted by social institutions—a vision also found in Condorcet and in Baron D'Holbach, among others of that era. In the nineteenth century, John Stuart Mill said that the "present wretched education" and "wretched social arrangements" were "the only real hindrance" to attaining general happiness among human beings. Mill's most ringing rhetoric reflected the unconstrained vision, though his eclecticism in many areas caused him to include devastating provisos more consonant with the constrained vision.
Much of nineteenth century socialism and twentieth century liberalism builds upon these foundations, modified and varying in degree, and applied to areas as disparate as education, war, and criminal justice. Marxism, as we shall see, was a special hybrid, applying a constrained vision to much of the past and an unconstrained vision to much of the future.
When Harod Laski said that "dissatisfaction" was an "expression of serious ill in the body politic," he was expressing the essence of the unconstrained vision, in which neither man nor nature have such inherent constraints as to disappoint our hopes, so that existing institutions, traditions, or rulers must be responsible for dissatisfaction. Conversely, when Malthus attributed human misery to "laws inherent in the nature of man, and absolutely independent of all human regulations," he was expressing one of the most extreme forms of the constrained vision, encompassing inherent constraints in both nature and man. Godwin's reply to Malthus, not surprisingly, applied the unconstrained vision to both nature and man: "Men are born into the world, in every country where the cultivation of the earth is practised, with the natural faculty in each man of producing more food than he can consume, a faculty which cannot be controlled but by the injurious exclusions of human institution." Given the unconstrained possibilities of man and nature, poverty or other sources of dissatisfaction could only be a result of evil intentions or blindness to solutions readily achievable by changing existing institutions. By contrast, Burke considered complaints about our times and rulers to be part of "the general infirmities of human nature," and that "true political sagacity" was required to separate these from real indicators of a special malaise. Hobbes went even further, arguing that it was precisely when men are "at ease" that they are most troublesome politically.
The constraints of nature are themselves important largely through the constraints of human nature. The inherent natural constraint of the need for food, for example, becomes a practical social problem only insofar as human beings multiply to the point where subsistence becomes difficult. Thus this central constraint of nature in Malthus becomes socially important only because of Malthus' highly constrained vision of human nature, which he saw as inevitably behaving in such a way as to populate the earth to that point. But Godwin, who readily conceded the natural constraint, had a very different vision of human nature, which would not heedlessly overpopulate. Therefore, the possibility of a geometrical increase in people was of no concern to Godwin because "possible men do not eat, though real men do." Malthus, on the other hand, saw overpopulation not as an abstract possibility in the future but as a concrete reality already manifested. According to Malthus, "the period when the number of men surpass their means of subsistence has long since arrived…has existed ever since we have had any histories of mankind, does exist at present, and will forever continue to exist." It would be hard to conceive of a more absolute statement of a constrained vision. Where Malthus and Godwin differed was not over a natural fact—the need for food—but over behavioral theories based on very different visions of human nature. Most followers of the unconstrained vision likewise acknowledge death, for example, as an inherent constraint of nature (though Godwin and Condorcet did not rule out an eventual conquest of death), but simply do not treat this as a constraint on the social development of mankind.
The great evils of the world—war, poverty, and crime, for example—are seen in completely different terms by those with the constrained and the unconstrained visions. If human options are not inherently constrained, then the presence of such repugnant and disastrous phenomena virtually cries out for explanation—and for solutions. But if the limitations and passions of man himself are at the heart of these painful phenomena, then what requires explanation are the ways in which they have been avoided or minimized. While believers in the unconstrained vision seek the special causes of war, poverty, and crime, believers in the constrained vision seek the special causes of peace, wealth, or a law abiding society. In the unconstrained vision, there are no intractable reasons for social evils and therefore no reason why they cannot be solved, with sufficient moral commitment. But in the constrained vision, whatever artifices or strategies restrain or ameliorate inherent human evils will themselves have costs, some in the form of other social ills created by these civilizing institution's, so that all that is possible is a prudent trade-off.
The two great revolutions of the eighteenth century—in France and in America—can be viewed as applications of these differing visions, though with all the reservations necessary whenever the flesh and blood of complex historical events are compared to skeletal theoretical models. The underlying premises of the French Revolution more clearly reflected the unconstrained vision of man which prevailed among its leaders. The intellectual foundations of the American Revolution were more mixed, including men like Thomas Paine and Thomas Jefferson, whose thinking was similar in many ways to that in France, but also including as a dominant influence on the Constitution, the classic constrained vision of man expressed in the The Federalist Papers. Where Robespierre looked forward to the end of revolutionary bloodshed, "when all people will have become equally devoted to their country and its laws," Alexander Hamilton in The Federalist Papers regarded the idea of individual actions "unbiased by considerations not connected with the public good" as a prospect "more ardently to be wished than seriously to be expected." Robespierre sought a solution, Hamilton a trade-off.
The Constitution of the United States, with its elaborate checks and balances, clearly reflected the view that no one was ever to be completely trusted with power. This was in sharp contrast to the French Revolution, which gave sweeping powers, including the power of life and death, to those who spoke in the name of "the people," expressing the Rousseauean "general will." Even when bitterly disappointed with particular leaders, who were then deposed and executed, believers in this vision did not substantially change their political systems or beliefs, viewing the evil as localized in individuals who had betrayed the revolution.
The writers of The Federalist Papers were quite conscious of the vision of man that underlay the Constitution of checks and balances which they espoused:
"It may be a reflection on human nature that such devices should be necessary to control the abuses of government. But what is government itself but the greatest of all reflections on human nature?"
To the Federalists, the evil was inherent in man, and institutions were simply ways of trying to cope with it. Adam Smith likewise saw government as "an imperfect remedy" for the deficiency of "wisdom and virtue" in man. The Federalist Papers said: "Why has government been instituted at all? Because the passions of men will not conform to the dictates of reason and justice without constraint."
To those without this constrained vision of man, the whole elaborate system of constitutional checks and balances was a needless complication and impediment. Condorcet condemned such "counterweights" for creating an "overcomplicated" political machine "to weigh upon the people." He saw no need for society to be "jostled between opposing powers" or held back by the "inertia" of constitutional checks and balances.
The constrained vision is a tragic vision of the human condition. The unconstrained vision is a moral vision of human intentions, which are viewed as ultimately decisive. The unconstrained vision promotes pursuit of the highest ideals and the best solutions. By contrast, the constrained vision sees the best as the enemy of the good—a vain attempt to reach the unattainable being seen as not only futile but often counterproductive, while the same efforts could have produced a viable and beneficial trade-off. Adam Smith applied this reasoning not only to economics but also to morality and politics: The prudent reformer, according to Smith, will respect "the confirmed habits and prejudices of the people," and when he cannot establish what is right, "he will not disdain to ameliorate the wrong." His goal is not to create the ideal but to "establish the best that the people can bear."
But Condorcet, expressing the unconstrained vision, rejected any notion that laws should "change with the temperature and adapt to the forms of government, to the practices that superstition has consecrated, and even to the stupidities adopted by each people.…" Thus he found the French Revolution superior to the American Revolution, for "the principles from which the constitution and laws of France were derived were purer" and allowed "the people to exercise their sovereign right" without constraint. Related to this is the question whether the institutions of one society can be transferred to another, or particular blueprints for better societies be applied to very different countries. Jeremy Bentham was noted for producing both specific reforms and general principles intended to apply in very different societies. Yet to Hamilton, "what may be good at Philadelphia may be bad at Paris and ridiculous at Petersburgh." Each of these conclusions is consistent with the respective vision from which it came.
While the constrained vision sees human nature as essentially unchanged across the ages and around the world, the particular cultural expressions of human needs peculiar to specific societies are not seen as being readily and beneficially changeable by forcible intervention. By contrast, those with the unconstrained vision tend to view human nature as beneficially changeable and social customs as expendable holdovers from the past.
Ideals are weighed against the cost of achieving them, in the constrained vision. But in the unconstrained vision, every closer approximation to the ideal should be preferred. Costs are regrettable, but by no means decisive. Thomas Jefferson's reply to those who turned against the French Revolution, because of the innocent people it had killed, exemplified this point: "My own affections have been deeply wounded by some of the martyrs to this cause, but rather than it should have failed, I would have seen half the earth desolated."
Belief in the irrelevance of process costs in the pursuit of social justice could hardly have been expressed more clearly or categorically. Yet, in the end, Jefferson too turned against the French Revolution, as its human cost increased beyond what he could continue to accept. Jefferson was not completely or irrevocably committed to the unconstrained vision.
The relative importance of process costs has continued, over the centuries, to distinguish the constrained and the unconstrained visions. Modern defenders of legal technicalities which allow criminals to escape punishment who declare, "That is the price we pay for freedom," or defenders of revolutions who say, "You can't make omelets without breaking eggs," are contemporary exemplars of an unconstrained vision which has historically treated process costs as secondary. At the other end of the philosophical spectrum are those who in essence repeat Adam Smith's view of process costs: "The peace and order of society is of more importance than even the relief of the miserable. " The continuing battle between ideals and the costs of achieving them is only one part of the ongoing conflict of visions.
Visions rest ultimately on some sense of the nature of man—not simply his existing practices but his ultimate potential and ultimate limitations. Those who see the potentialities of human nature as extending far beyond what is currently manifested have a social vision quite different from those who see human beings as tragically limited creatures whose selfish and dangerous impulses can be contained only by social contrivances which themselves produce unhappy side effects. William Godwin and Adam Smith are two of the clearest and most consistent exemplars of these respective social visions—the unconstrained and the constrained. Yet they were neither the first nor the last in these two long traditions of social thought. When Rousseau said that man "is born free" but "is everywhere in chains," he expressed the essence of the unconstrained vision, in which the fundamental problem is not nature or man but institutions. According to Rousseau, "men are not naturally enemies." The diametrically opposite vision was presented in Hobbes' Leviathan, where the armed power of political institutions was all that prevented the war of each against all that would otherwise exist among men in their natural state, where life would be "solitary, poore, nasty, brutish, and short." While the unconstrained vision of Condorcet led him to seek a society in which man's "natural inclination" would coincide with the social good, Hayek's constrained vision led to the conclusion that the "indispensable rules of the free society require from us much that is unpleasant"—that is, man's nature inherently could not coincide with the social good but must be deliberately subordinated to it, despite the unpleasantness this entailed.
Given the wider capabilities of man in the unconstrained vision, the intentions which guide those capabilities are especially important. Words and concepts which revolve around intention—"sincerity," "commitment," "dedication"—have been central to the unconstrained vision for centuries, and the policies sought by this vision have often been described in terms of their intended goals: "liberty, equality, fraternity," "ending the exploitation of man by man," or "social justice," for example. But in the constrained vision, where man's ability to directly consummate his intentions is very limited, intentions mean far less. Burke referred to "the Beneficial effects of human faults" and to "the ill consequences attending the most undoubted Virtues." Adam Smith's entire economic doctrine of laissez faire implicitly assumed the same lack of correspondence between intention and effect, for the systemic benefits of capitalism were no part of the intention of capitalists. In the constrained vision, social processes are described not in terms of intentions or ultimate goals, but in terms of the systemic characteristics deemed necessary to contribute to those goals—"property rights," "free enterprise," or "strict construction" of the Constitution, for example. It is not merely that there are different goals in the two visions but, more fundamentally, that the goals relate to different things. The unconstrained vision speaks directly in terms of desired results, the constrained vision in terms of process characteristics considered conducive to desired results, but not directly or without many unhappy side effects, which are accepted as part of a trade-off.
With all the complex differences among social thinkers as of a given time, and still more so over time, it is nevertheless possible to recognize certain key assumptions about human nature and about social causation which permit some to be grouped together as belonging to the constrained vision and others as belonging to the unconstrained vision. Although these groupings do not encompass all social theorists, they cover many important figures and enduring ideological conflicts of the past two centuries.
Running through the tradition of the unconstrained vision is the conviction that foolish or immoral choices explain the evils of the world—and that wiser or more moral and humane social policies are the solution. William Godwin's elaboration of this unconstrained vision in his Enquiry Concerning Political Justice drew upon and systematized such ideas found among numerous eighteenth century thinkers—Jean Jacques Rousseau, Voltaire, Condorcet, Thomas Paine, and D'Holbach being notable examples. This general approach was carried forth in the nineteenth century, in their very different ways, by Saint Simon, Robert Owen, and by George Bernard Shaw and other Fabians. Its twentieth century echoes are found in political theorists such as Harold Laski, in economists like Thorstein Veblen and John Kenneth Galbraith, and in the law with a whole school of advocates of judicial activism, epitomized by Ronald Dworkin in theory and Earl Warren in practice.
By contrast, the constrained vision sees the evils of the world as deriving from the limited and unhappy choice available, given the inherent moral and intellectual limitations of human beings. For amelioration of these evils and the promotion of progress, they rely on the systemic characteristics of certain social processes such as moral traditions, the marketplace, or families. They conceive of these processes as evolved rather than designed—and rely on these general patterns of social interaction rather than on specific policy designed to directly produce particular results for particular individuals and groups. This constrained view of human capacities found in Adam Smith is also found in a long series of other social thinkers ranging from Thomas Hobbes in the seventeenth century, through Edmund Burke and the authors of The Federalist Papers among Smith's contemporaries, through such twentieth-century figures as Oliver Wendell Holmes in law, Milton Friedman in economics, and Friedrich A. Hayek in general social theory.
Not all social thinkers fit this schematic dichotomy. John Stuart Mill and Karl Marx, for example, do not fit, for very different reasons. Others take midway positions between the two visions, or convert from one to the other. However, the conflict of visions is no less real because everyone has not chosen sides or irrevocably committed themselves.
Despite necessary caveats, it remains an important and remarkable phenomenon that how human nature is conceived at the outset is highly correlated with the whole conception of knowledge, morality, power, time, rationality, war, freedom, and law which defines a social vision.
Because various beliefs, theories, and systems of social thought are spread across a continuum (perhaps even a multidimensional continuum), it might in one sense be more appropriate to refer to less constrained visions and more constrained visions instead of the dichotomy used here. However, the dichotomy is not only more convenient but also captures an important distinction. Virtually no one believes that man is 100 percent unconstrained and virtually no one believes that man is 100 percent constrained. What puts a given thinker in the tradition of one vision rather than the other is not simply whether he refers more to man's constraints or to his untapped potential but whether, or to what extent, constraints are built into the very structure and operation of a particular theory. Those whose theories incorporate these constraints as a central feature have a constrained vision; those whose theories do not make these constraints an integral or central part of the analysis have an unconstrained vision. Every vision, by definition, leaves something out—indeed, leaves most things out. The dichotomy between constrained and unconstrained visions is based on whether or not inherent limitations of man are among the key elements included in each vision.
The dichotomy is justified in yet another sense. These different ways of conceiving man and the world lead not merely to different conclusions but to sharply divergent, often diametrically opposed, conclusions of issues ranging from justice to war. There are not merely differences of visions but conflicts of visions.
Thomas Sowell is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution and author of Knowledge and Decisions, Ethnic America, and other books.
From A Conflict of Visions by Thomas Sowell. Copyright © 1987 by Thomas Sowell. Reprinted with permission of William Morrow & Co., Inc.
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]]>Issues revolving around poverty and "income distribution" are among the most controversial of our time, so a book that offers new facts on these subjects—some light to go with the heat—has at least the promise of being valuable. Years of Poverty, Years of Plenty is such a book. It exhibits both the best and the worst of modern "social science."
First, the best: It summarizes and analyzes for a more general public the results of a massive, ongoing study at the University of Michigan on income and poverty in America. This is done with a clarity that belies the impression too often created that social scientists are incapable of writing English. Tables are organized well and explained with care, so that the meaning of the numbers becomes readily apparent. The actual findings of the study are also very important and challenging to many widely held beliefs.
Then the worst: Interspersed with this careful analysis, especially in the second half of the book, is freewheeling policy prescription on issues that would each require a book twice this size. Indeed, the selection and presentation of factual evidence suffers from the constant oscillation between analysis and policy prescription. An otherwise excellent book thus degenerates repeatedly into tendentious politics. The authors clearly want to "do good," and they insist on doing it between the covers of the same slim volume in which they are analyzing complex social phenomena.
In contrast to a vast literature that uses annual income statistics to determine inequality or poverty among Americans, this study sees this annual data as only an instantaneous snapshot of a complex ongoing process that must be understood as a process, rather than as a collection of momentary details. For example, nearly half the families who were in the bottom 20 percent in 1971 were not there in 1978, and 6 percent of these "poor" families were later in the top 20 percent. Likewise, less than half of those families in the top 20 percent remained there for the entire period. This fluidity was common throughout the income distribution. Less than half of all American families remained in the same income stratum—the same quintile—both years.
What does this do for our popular concepts of "the poor," or "the affluent," who tend to be discussed as if they were people persistently in the same relative positions in the income hierarchy? Those who are persistently poor—in the bottom 20 percent at least eight out of 10 years—are less than 3 percent of the US population.
The very concept of a family also becomes less set in stone from a multiyear perspective. At the end of 11 years, nearly half of all families were headed by a different person. The growing up of children, the remarriage of widows, the divorce of parents, all create a very dynamic process that confounds static definitions.
This study reveals that the family, among other things, redistributes income—far more income than the government redistributes. The formation and dissolution of families is one of the major factors in getting women into and out of poverty. More than half the difference between black and white women in their rate of change in income was due to the lower marriage rates of black women.
A dynamic study of welfare recipients likewise presents a different picture from that derived from one-year statistics. Just as there is a considerable turnover among people at different income levels, there is also a considerable turnover of people on welfare. This means that there is a much larger proportion of the population on welfare over a decade than at any given time. About one-fourth of the total population received at least one of the many forms of welfare, at some time or other during the decade beginning in 1969. But less than 1 percent of the population received half or more of their income from welfare in as many as eight years of that decade.
Employment was also found to be quite different when seen in a one-year snapshot, as compared to a multiyear motion picture. The hourly rates of pay for men in their prime working ages changed by an average of 25 percent from one year to the next. Moreover, while both black and white male household heads averaged more than 2,000 hours worked in 1969, most of them also had hours fluctuations over the next decade of at least 250 hours per year—the equivalent of more than six weeks' work. A substantial majority had hours variations of at least 500 hours for at least one year of the decade.
Years of Poverty, Years of Plenty is at its best in its descriptions of dynamic income changes. When it proceeds to the next step of determining causation, it ventures onto shaky ground, and when it tries to prescribe policy it sinks into a swamp. While this book's virtues are its own, its faults are common to a large body of "social science" literature and so are well worth exploring for that reason.
Statistical "explanations" of causation are essentially statements that holding constant some variable (education, urbanization, etc.) will reduce the income differences between groups by some fraction. But, like others who use specialized terminology with highly restricted meaning, the authors of this study drift into using it as if its more general meaning also applied. Thus, after various factors used to "explain" male-female income differences still leave a substantial unexplained residual, the authors ask: "If skills do not 'explain' most of the wage gap, then what does explain it?" After a momentary pause to note the difficulty of testing alternative hypotheses, the authors proceed to ignore this caveat, come down heavily on the side of discrimination, and launch into advocacy of various government policy "solutions," including affirmative action, equal pay laws, and projecting a different image of women in textbooks. They even assert that sex discrimination has been "proven" before the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission—omitting the crucial point that such "proof" almost invariably consists of nothing more than statistics used in precisely the same way that this study uses them to "explain" economic differences. The authors add that discrimination is "confirmed by psychologists and sociologists," a statement that is undoubtedly correct as to the general state of political opinion in the so-called social sciences but says nothing about the actual situation in the real world.
The problems inherent in this shifting use of words such as explain and proof become apparent if we consider height as an explanation of wage differences. If the wages earned by each person in the population are tabulated along with his or her height, we will undoubtedly find a significant correlation between height and earnings, because most people under five feet tall are too young to be earning anything. Statistically, holding height constant will therefore reduce income differences and so "explain" a certain amount of variance. But in fact it has explained nothing in any meaningful cause-and-effect sense. Growing up simply happens to be related to acquiring schooling, skills, and experience, all of which affect earnings.
The authors of this study understand this principle. They simply proceed as if they don't—like many "social scientists" trying to do good. They acknowledge more than once that the variables they specify may not be defined and measured with the precision required for conclusive evidence. Ultimately that is true of all variables in all studies. However, what is crucial here is not that these authors have approached no closer to perfection than anyone else, but that large and well-known qualitative differences in the education of men and women are utterly ignored in their statistical "explanation."
What the authors treat in their statistics as the "same" education is not close to being the same between males and females, beginning in high school and especially in higher education. The mathematics component—crucial in the social sciences and engineering, and increasingly important in other fields—is not even remotely the same. Young women enter college with far less mathematics background than young men—so much so as to put large areas of study off-limits to women from the beginning. Ignoring this is not a question of general measurement problems but rather of ignoring things known in advance to be very different in the groups being compared. It is as if the height "explanation" of earnings were to be used in "explaining" economic differences between the Swedes and the Japanese, knowing in advance that these two groups differ in average height at every age. By dichotomizing all possible reasons for sex differences in earnings into discrimination and socialization, the authors also utterly ignore physical differences that affect the likelihood that women will enter physically demanding and well-paid fields, such as construction, mining, and the like.
Most important of all, discrimination is not treated like other possible explanations and subjected to empirical tests and analytical critiques. It is the residual beneficiary of anything not explained by other specified variables. If it isn't discrimination, then what is it? That is the basic challenge. Others have asked: If it isn't genetics, then what is it? Still others might ask: If it isn't culture, then what is it? If it isn't luck, etc., etc.?
This approach is in complete contrast to the way the same authors proceed when testing alternative theories of the labor market in general. Here they compare alternative "human capital" and "dual labor market" theories, and test them against each other and the facts. They do not say that any residual unexplained by one must be due to the other.
Given the huge unexplained residuals commonplace in the social sciences at this stage of their development, the automatic attribution of the unexplained to some favored theory is especially indefensible. At its worst, it borders on the Marxist tactic of declaring that something is "no accident"—the only alternative to chance being their special theory.
Other parts of the liberal-left vision are "proven" in equally cavalier fashion. People's own attitudes and values have little effect on their economic fate, the authors conclude, because attitude survey answers have little or no correlation with subsequent economic levels. But this ignores the fundamental point that values are ultimately questions of trade-offs, of how much one is willing to sacrifice of one thing to achieve other things. Attitude surveys are tests of lip service, not sacrifices. It is hardly surprising that such surveys often show low-performance groups with the same "values" as high-performance groups when values are defined in ways that have no relevance to the issue.
Finally, when the authors turn directly to policy prescription, the arbitrary and the unsubstantiated come into their own. After having demonstrated, at the beginning of the book, the slippery and ever-changing human content of such categories as "the family" or "the poor," the authors nevertheless end by implicitly accepting, as the touchstone of social policy, statistical parity of results among such categories. Why it is morally imperative that statistical categories look equal on paper is a question never addressed. Worse, the authors falsely attribute to others the notion that labor markets are morally "fair," that women "deserve" less pay than men. This is quite a degeneration for a book whose special qualities might represent a major contribution to understanding, if it did not so readily succumb to the fashions, visions, and moral self-indulgence that make a mockery of much contemporary "social science."
Thomas Sowell, an economist, is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution. He is the author of numerous books, including Knowledge and Decisions, The Economics and Politics of Race, Civil Rights: Rhetoric or Reality?, and, most recently, Marxism: Philosophy and Economics.
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]]>William L. Shirer is one of the grand old names of American journalism. His monumental work, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, assures him a place in history. Those of us of an older vintage also recall his bestselling Berlin Diary, published during World War II, and the mellow voice and penetrating words that marked his radio broadcasts as a foreign correspondent from Europe and a commentator in America. Now, in The Nightmare Years: 1930–1940, Shirer presents a more personalized reprise of his experiences and observations during that fateful period of history.
The 1930s are more than history, however. They were a searing revelation about Western civilization—its pathetic wishful thinking, its failures of will and courage. Whatever sheds light on that era, half a century ago, sheds light on today.
The Nightmare Years sheds a piercing light on the people and policies of the decade that led up to World War II. Shirer is at his best as a reporter. It is by no means clear that he himself draws the deeper implications that reach beyond the particular cast of characters that held the stage in those years. Yet you cannot find a clearer account or more readable analysis of how the Western democracies stumbled into World War II—and almost lost it.
Shirer's personal portraits of the Nazis show them as social garbage—not "just" mass murderers and fanatics but cheap thugs and shallow "losers." How, then, did they win politically—first in Germany and then in a spectacular series of international political victories, culminating in the Munich agreement of 1938 that gave them strategically crucial portions of Czechoslovakia, without firing a shot?
A shrewd understanding of the weaknesses of other people seems to have been their key advantage. Hitler used that advantage time and again, in a meteoric rise from fringe-movement fanatic to master of Europe. In the process, he inadvertently provided a road map of the vulnerabilities of democratic Western society. That is the lasting significance of his career.
Shirer points out how utterly weak and insignificant the Nazis were politically, just three years before Hitler became chancellor of Germany. As of the middle of 1930, the Nazis had only 12 seats in the Reichstag, which numbered more than 600 members. This was where the Nazis stood after a decade of agitation, which had brought them more ridicule than respect. But elections in the autumn of 1930 suddenly increased the Nazi seats in the Reichstag almost tenfold. Two years later, the Nazis won 230 seats out of 608. It was the high-water mark of their political support in a free society. Early in 1933, Hitler became chancellor, and in March 1934, dictator.
How did he do it? His success was the mirror image of the failures of others who held power—and, supposedly, responsibility—in a democratic society. The economic woes of the Weimar Republic and the faltering and indecisive leadership of its senile President Paul von Hindenburg set the stage for a man who was anything but indecisive. Hitler had all the answers (even if they were wrong), and no one doubted his will to enforce them. More than that, he struck a deep resonance when he voiced the wounded pride of a Germany beaten in World War I and humiliated by the Treaty of Versailles that ended it. Few things are more politically potent than a damaged ego and a cry of victimhood, mobilized for revenge.
At the height of his electoral strength in a free Germany, Hitler was still outnumbered by his political enemies. The same would be true militarily of Nazi Germany right on up to the eve of World War II. United and decisive action by democratic leaders could have doomed Hitler in German politics or on the international stage. But there was nothing resembling united or decisive action against Hitler in either situation. The genius of Hitler was that he understood fully just how incapable the democratic leadership was of united or decisive action. The tragedy of the democratic world is that they have never understood this dangerous flaw in themselves—not even half a century after Hitler.
Shirer points out again and again the military superiority of the West against Germany as Hitler moved systematically from open violations of the Treaty of Versailles to the seizure of Austria and the dismemberment of Czechoslovakia. Nor is this simply Shirer's opinion. The German generals at the time were shocked and shaken by the international confrontations Hitler provoked with nations who were quite capable of destroying Germany. Hitler's trump card, however, was his sharp insight into the spinelessness of the West and their will to believe anything that would spare them the costs of maintaining a military defense force, much less initiating military action.
In a formula so simple as to be laughable, Hitler simply talked peace and negotiated finely worded peace agreements, while building up the most crushing war machine the world had ever seen. Though some of this was done clandestinely in the early years, to stay within the Treaty of Versailles until he was strong enough to openly repudiate it, even this clandestine military buildup was well-known to Western intelligence agencies. There was no way to conceal it from Western leaders—only from the Western public. That left it up to Western leaders to be the ones to tell the public the bad news.
Hitler knew that—then as now—political leaders who warn of other countries' military buildups are themselves labeled "warmongers" or even front men for the munitions industry. In modern democratic politics, it is still the custom to kill the messenger who brings bad news. Hitler knew that very few Western politicians would want to be that messenger. He made their task doubly difficult by constantly speaking of "peace," by offering to negotiate all issues at the conference table, by making token and meaningless "concessions." Shirer quotes some of Hitler's "peace" speeches, which are absolute gems of hypocrisy—and very much like "peace" speeches we hear today from totalitarian leaders and those who echo them in the West.
What is truly frightening about Hitler's simple strategy was that it worked. He assembled a gigantic war machine in plain view, and his obvious victims felt no need to counter it. There was no "arms race." Massive and militant peace movements in the West during the 1930s succeeded in preventing any arms race.
Isolated individuals who urged that Hitler's military force be offset by developing a Western counterforce got nowhere. Charles de Gaulle was ignored in France. Winston Churchill was denounced and ridiculed in Britain. But politicians who gave the public what they wanted—negotiated agreements—were cheered by huge throngs. This was especially true of French Premier Edouard Daladier and British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain, when they returned from Munich in 1938 with an agreement that supposedly guaranteed "peace in our time." Within a year, the most catastrophic war in the history of mankind was under way.
The Nightmare Years tells this story and tells it well. Its many accounts of the blindness, pettiness, vanity, and plain stupidity that marked the road to tragedy should be a welcome antidote to those who attribute everything to ultra-rational scheming by a malign and faceless "establishment." As narrative, this book is unsurpassed, especially with such complex material that could so easily have degenerated into academic "scholarship." However, there are no grand lessons drawn at the end, though the materials for many lessons are here.
Indeed, there are some disquieting signs at the end that Shirer himself may have forgotten what he had just shown us. In the epilogue, the United States and the Soviet Union are even-handedly referred to as "two superpowers" whose problems are apparently psychological—"hostility" and "lack of trust." President Truman is said to have made a "fiery statement" and issued "dire threats" when he announced that an atomic bomb had been dropped on Hiroshima, in an attempt to end World War II. Japan's defeat was "inevitable," according to Shirer, "one way or another," so we are left wondering why Truman was so bellicose and used nuclear weapons. The human cost of that "inevitable" victory over Japan by invasion is ignored by Shirer, though others have estimated it as many times larger than the number of people killed at Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
It is almost as if the author regards the story he has just told as being uniquely about Hitler and Germans and an assortment of other actors who have since passed from the scene. But the story is much larger and more enduring than that. What Hitler revealed about the weaknesses and susceptibilities of the West has not been lost on others and should not be forgotten by the West.
Thomas Sowell is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University. He is the author of numerous works, including Civil Rights: Rhetoric or Reality, and his latest work, Marxism.
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]]>Professor Peter T. Bauer, of the London School of Economics, is one of those intellectually heroic figures who has stood fast against the fads and hysteria of his time. While the vast currents of "development economics" inundated us with "overpopulation" theories and "vicious cycle of poverty" doctrines that depicted massive foreign aid as the only salvation of the Third World, Bauer said "No!" loud and clear—but virtually alone.
Despite his scholarly achievements and personal experience in the underdeveloped world, Bauer was long ignored or disparaged as he poked holes in the prevailing orthodoxy. Today, he can no longer be ignored—not even in academic and media circles where the prevailing orthodoxy was once treated as the one true faith. Bauer's message has begun to be heard, not only because of his own perseverance and insights, but also because the repeated failures and massive disasters of "development planning" have finally broken through the smug unanimity that long substituted for evidence or critical analysis.
Reality and Rhetoric is a compilation of Bauer's essays over the years on such topics as foreign aid, "planning" versus markets in the Third World, imperialism, and the moralistic pronouncements of the clergy on the international economic order. These essays are written and reasoned in a very straightforward way. It is enough to make you forget that he is an economist.
Bauer's criticisms of current thinking about Third World nations are both wide and deep. He questions the very concept of "foreign aid" or "the Third World." Whether international transfers of money to the less-developed nations are an aid or a hindrance to their economic progress is for Bauer a question rather than a foregone conclusion. His own reading of the evidence is that it has hindered more than it has helped.
The tremendous range of extremely different nations lumped together as "the Third World" likewise makes no sense to him. All that these nations have in common is that they receive "foreign aid." A few of these recipient nations have even had higher per capita income than some of the donor nations. Most—if not all—of the poorer nations have classes of people who are more affluent than the average Western taxpayer in the donor nations—and it is precisely those affluent people who have the inside track in getting their hands on the foreign aid.
Bauer is not a mere Scrooge who says "Bah! Humbug!" to the poor. On the contrary, his vision of the world accords far more respect to the less-developed regions and peoples than does the conventional viewpoint. Bauer denounces the "contempt for ordinary people" that underlies development planning.
Drawing on his own many years of research and observation, he punctures the idea that Third World people can progress only under the tutelage of foreign experts or their own westernized elite. Evidence to the contrary, he notes, is found in "the large scale capital formation in agriculture by the local people" in West Africa; the fact that over half the acreage planted with rubber trees in southeast Asia was owned by Asians, even before World War II; and large-scale international migrations by poor and illiterate people who were nevertheless "well informed about economic conditions in distant and alien countries."
Dramatic economic changes over time likewise belie the stereotypical picture of hopelessly stagnant peasants needing foreign "experts" or domestic political "leaders" to get them going. Bauer notes: "In the space of a decade or two, the illiterate peasantry of South-East Asia and West Africa planted millions of acres to produce new cash crops; and rubber, cocoa and kola trees, for example, take five years to become productive." So much for the notion that Third World masses cannot think beyond today.
Bauer also recognizes "the reality and importance of group differences" within the population of a given nation, even though this subject "is virtually proscribed in the profession." Particular segments of the population of very poor and backward nations often have people who are entrepreneurial, hard-working, thrifty, and with great initiative and imagination. Far from making use of such people for advancing the economic level of the country, many Third World governments devote great efforts to stifling or even expelling such groups, especially when they are racial or ethnic minorities whose prosperity is envied and resented by others. The Chinese in Southeast Asia, the Indians in East Africa, the Lebanese in West Africa, and the Jews historically in Eastern Europe are only some of the more-prominent examples of this very widespread phenomenon.
Early in his career, Bauer was struck by these intergroup differences, which were largely ignored by other development economists: "The differences in economic performance and hence in achievement among groups were immediately evident, indeed startling." Unskilled plantation workers in Malaya, working with primitive implements, nevertheless differed in output by a ratio of two-to-one as between Chinese and Indian workers, though both were "uneducated coolies." Differences in other occupations—especially entrepreneurial occupations—are even greater.
Contrary to the prevailing egalitarian ethic, Bauer declares that "differences in incomes and rates of progress between individuals, groups and regions…are not reprehensible. They are inevitable." Egalitarianism is to Bauer simply the "legitimization of envy." He rejects "the notion that the well-off have prospered at the expense of the poor" and calls it "the most pernicious of all economic misconceptions." Implicitly, it assumes a zero-sum world, in which A gains only at the expense of B, and turns attention away from the central issue of how to increase total wealth. Throttling the production of wealth, in the name of equality, is not humanitarianism but moralistic self-indulgence. So is guilt. Bauer regards "guilt in the West toward the Third World" as "a feeling which does nothing to assist the ordinary people" of the poorer countries.
If your purpose is to understand economic development in the poorer nations, you cannot get a better brief introduction to the subject than in Reality and Rhetoric. If your purpose is to learn the latest fashions in theories and buzzwords, this is not the place. "Statement of the obvious," Bauer says, "has become a major task," in part because "prominent economists have perpetuated the grossest elementary transgressions of fact and logic." Words like infrastructure and phrases like the vicious cycle of poverty have created reputations and programs, even as they have soared above reality and left disaster after disaster in their wake.
Bauer not only mentions some of these disasters but points out how "foreign aid" subsidizes them. The international aid organizations' emphasis on "need" in general and short-run crisis management in particular means that poor nations that have behaved responsibly, and lived within their means, are far less likely to get money than governments that have spent lavishly, engaged in grandiose social and economic experiments, and run up huge foreign debt without any concern for how—or whether—they would pay it off. Bauer is not afraid to call this "preferential treatment of the incompetent, the improvident or dishonest."
In its effects on national well-being, the difference between responsible and irresponsible government is seen by Bauer as far more important than the sums transferred by international aid organizations. Insofar as these transfers reward counterproductive government policies, the losses they engender may readily exceed any benefits they can purchase. The sums involved in these international transfers are often not very large relative to total national output but are very impressive as a percentage of government discretionary spending. Therefore their effect on government policy may be very large—and very counterproductive—while they directly add relatively little to the available resources of the economy.
In India, for example, foreign aid in 1980 amounted to less than 2 percent of gross national product (GNP), but it was 18 percent as large as the government's total tax receipts. In Tanzania, foreign aid was 18 percent of GNP and slightly larger than all taxes received by the government.
In short, foreign aid greatly increases the recipient government's economic leverage in the economy. In addition, international development agencies tend to be biased toward statist policies, both inherently and as a matter of choice. Inherently because it is, after all, governments that receive both financial resources and the advisory personnel provided by the international development agencies. Moreover, "many staff members of the international organizations favour dirigiste policies (state economic planning)," according to Bauer.
"The international aid organizations and their staffs are not disinterested," Bauer points out, but instead have heavy personal and institutional stakes in a large and growing amount of foreign aid. These aid organizations are politically active and effective in the Western nations. Their version of the world economic picture is constantly fed through the media to the public as the only humane and decent way to see it. They have patronage to offer academics in the form of jobs and consulting arrangements. At the same time, these international bureaucratic empires are dependent on the Third World nations to accept their aid—and often express fears that the aid would be refused if various conditions were attached to ensure responsible behavior by the recipients.
The moral climate generated by Western intellectuals—including the media and the clergy—is one of the key ingredients in the political success of this process of draining money from Western taxpayers for the benefit of Third World ruling classes and international bureaucracies. Guilt is one of the factors in this moral climate.
The idea that the poverty of some nations is caused by the affluence of other nations is taken as axiomatic in many quarters. Bauer, however, treats this notion as a hypothesis instead of an axiom and looks at the evidence. He finds that in fact poverty and backwardness are greatest in those Third World nations that have been least touched by Western imperialism, trade, or multinational corporations—for example, Ethiopia and Liberia in Africa, and Bhutan, Sikkim, Tibet, and Nepal in Asia.
Far from deferring to the moral authority of politically active clergy, Bauer characterizes their arguments as "immoral because they are incompetent." He says: "There is profound truth in Pascal's maxim that working hard to think clearly is the beginning of moral conduct." Bauer sees these activist clergy as "seeking a new role for themselves in the face of widespread erosion or even the collapse of traditional beliefs." Their susceptibility to any idea that calls itself "social justice" he regards as symptomatic of a lost religious faith that finds a substitute in secular credulity.
Professor Bauer is no longer alone, though he is still vastly outnumbered by those with a vested interest in the foreign-aid status quo. This book will make it harder for them to continue to pull the wool over the eyes of the taxpaying public.
Thomas Sowell, an economist at the Hoover Institution in Stanford, California, is the author of numerous books, including The Economics and Politics of Race and Civil Rights: Rhetoric or Reality?
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