Originally
published as "Frank S. Meyer: The Fusionist as Libertarian Manqué"
in the Fall 1981 issue of Modern Age. It was then reprinted
in George W. Carey, ed., Freedom
and Virtue: The Conservative/Libertarian Debate (Lanham,
MD: University Press of America, 1984) and as an Occasional Paper
by the Center for Libertarian Studies. Ed.
Until
a few years ago, the conservative spectrum could be comfortably
sundered into the "traditionalists" at one pole, the "libertarians"
at the other, and the "fusionists" as either judicious
synthesizers or muddled moderates (depending on one's point of view)
in between. The traditionalists were, I contend, in favor of state-coerced
morality; the libertarians were allegedly in favor of liberty but
soft on virtue; the fusionists at least from their own perspective
combined the best of both poles by favoring tradition and
morality on the one hand, but freedom of choice and individual rights
on the other.
Now,
however, it is impossible to sustain these neat classifications.
In the first place, the varieties of conservative thought and policy
have greatly expanded and diversified in recent years, so that the
familiar triad can scarcely suffice any longer. It is difficult
to figure out, for example, what the ideologies of the Rev. Jerry
Falwell, the late Frank S. Meyer, M.E. Bradford, Harry Jaffa, Donald
Atwell Zoll, Russell Kirk, Seymour Martin Lipset, and Jude Wanniski
have in common; the venerable triad is scarcely enough to encompass
them all. Secondly, the libertarians have broken off to form their
own movement, and the characterization of them as devoid of concern
for morality is distorted and oversimplified, to say the least.
Furthermore,
the fusionists used to maintain that, while their success was far
from assured among conservative intellectuals, at least the conservative
masses were fusionists to the core. But the burgeoning of the Moral
Majority and allied movements have at least called this into question.
I
propose in this essay to examine conservatism by using as a fulcrum
an analysis of the views of the leading conservative fusionist,
Frank S. Meyer.
The
conceptual chaos of conservatism may be traced back to its origins:
a reaction against the New Deal. Since modern conservatism emerged
in response to the particular leap into statism of the 1930s and
1940s, it necessarily took on the features of any "popular
front": that is, defined more by what it opposed than what
it stood for. As a result, conservatism came to include a congeries
of opponents of the New Deal, who had little positive in common.
If we wish to inquire what all of these groups had in common, beyond
sheer hatred of Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal, I can think of only
one theme linking them all: opposition to egalitarianism, to compulsory
levelling by use of state power; beyond that, conservatism is Chaos
and Old Night. Even negative reaction to the New Deal no longer
suffices for anything like a coherent stance, since not only is
there a problem of which aspects of the New Deal to focus on, but
also whether the post-New Deal system should remain in place and
be subject only to marginal adjustment that is, whether conservatism
should be a holding operation or whether the system should
be repealed in toto.
FREEDOM
AND VIRTUE
At
the heart of the dispute between the traditionalists and the libertarians
is the question of freedom and virtue: Should virtuous action (however
we define it) be compelled, or should it be left up to the free
and voluntary choice of the individual? Here only two answers are
possible; any fusionist attempt to find a Third Way, a synthesis
of the two, would simply be impossible and violate the law of the
excluded middle.
In
fact, Frank Meyer was, on this crucial issue, squarely in the libertarian
camp. In my view, his most important contribution to conservatism
was his emphasis that to be virtuous in any meaningful sense, a
man's action must be free. It is not simply that freedom and virtue
are both important, and that one hopes that freedom of choice will
lead to virtuous actions. The point is more forceful: no action
can be virtuous unless it is freely chosen.
Suppose,
for a moment, that we define a virtuous act as bowing in the direction
of Mecca every day at sunset. We attempt to persuade everyone to
perform this act. But suppose that instead of relying on voluntary
conviction we employ a vast number of police to break into everyone's
home and see to it that every day they are pushed down to the floor
in the direction of Mecca. No doubt by taking such measures we will
increase the number of people bowing toward Mecca. But by forcing
them to do so, we are taking them out of the realm of action and
into mere motion, and we are depriving all these coerced persons
of the very possibility of acting morally. By attempting to compel
virtue, we eliminate its possibility. For by compelling everyone
to bow to Mecca, we are preventing people from doing so out of freely
adopted conviction. To be moral, an act must be free.
Frank
Meyer put it eloquently in his In Defense
of Freedom:
... freedom
can exist at no lesser price than the danger of damnation; and
if freedom is indeed the essence of man's being, that which distinguishes
him from the beasts, he must be free to choose his worst as well
as his best end. Unless he can choose his worst, he cannot choose
his best.
And
again:
For moral
and spiritual perfection can only be pursued by finite men through
a series of choices, in which every moment is a new beginning;
and freedom which makes those choices possible is itself a condition
without which the moral and spiritual ends would be meaningless.
If this were not so, if such ends could be achieved without the
continuing exercise of freedom, then moral and spiritual perfection
could be taught by rote and enforced by discipline and
every man of good will would be a saint. Freedom is therefore
an integral aspect of the highest end.1
Freedom,
in short, is a necessary but not sufficient condition for the achievement
of virtue. With Lord Acton, we may say that freedom is the highest
political end; in that subset of ethical principle that deals
with the legitimacy of the use of violence between men, the libertarian
as well as the fusionist Meyer position holds that
violence must be strictly limited to defending the freedom of individuals,
their rights to person and property, against violent interference
by others.
There
is, then, nothing synthesizing about the "fusionist" position
on this vital point; it is libertarian, period.
There
is an odd aspect of the statist position on the enforcement of virtue
that has gone unnoticed. It is bad enough, from the libertarian
perspective, that the non-libertarian conservatives (along with
all other breeds of statists) are eager to enforce compulsory virtue;
but which group of men do they pick to do the enforcing? Which group
in society are to be the guardians of virtue, the ones who define
and enforce their vision of what virtue is supposed to be? None
other, I would say, than the state apparatus, the social instrument
of legalized violence. Now, even if we concede legitimate functions
to the policeman, the soldier, the jailer, it is a peculiar vision
that would entrust the guardianship of morality to a social group
whose historical record for moral behavior is hardly encouraging.2
Why should the sort of persons who are good at, and will therefore
tend to exercise, the arts of shooting, gouging, and stomping, be
the same persons we would want to select as our keepers of the moral
flame? Hayek's brilliant chapter on "Why the Worst Get to the
Top" applies not only to totalitarianism, but, in a lesser
degree to be sure, to any attempts to enforce morality by means
of the state:
While
we are likely to think that, since the desire for a collective system
springs from high moral motives, such a system must be the breeding-ground
for the highest virtues, there is, in fact, no reason why any system
should enhance those attitudes which serve the purpose for which
it was designed. The ruling moral views will depend partly on qualities
that will lead individuals to success in a collectivist or totalitarian
system and partly on the requirements of the totalitarian machinery.3
It
would seem far better, then, to entrust the guardianship of moral
principles to organized bootblacks than to the professional wielders
of violence who constitute the state apparatus.
If
the state is to be the guardian and enforcer of morality, it follows
that it should be the inculcator of moral principles as well. Among
traditionalist conservatives, Walter Berns has been particularly
dedicated to the idea of the nation-state as moulding and controlling
the education of the youth, even going so far as to laud the work
of Horace Mann. Meyer, on the other hand, was never more passionate
in his libertarianism than when contemplating state education and
the public school system that mighty engine for the inculcation
of "civic virtue." The responsibility for educating the
young rests properly with the parent, the family, and not with the
state.
WHAT
OF THE FUSIONIST CRITIQUE OF LIBERTARIANISM?
If
the fusionist position is simply the libertarian position
on freedom-and-virtue, then what of the fusionist critique of libertarianism:
that it ignores virtue altogether in the pursuit of freedom (or,
at least, ignores virtue insofar as it goes beyond freedom itself)?
Much of this critique rests on a fundamental misunderstanding of
what libertarianism is all about. Thus, Professor John P. East speaks
of the traditionalist concern about contemporary libertarianism
(which he, as a fusionist, seems to share): "of taking a valid
point, in this case the importance of the individual and his rights,
and elevating it to the first principle of life with all other considerations
excluded." (John
P. East, "Conservatism and Libertarianism: Vital Complements,"
in Freedom
and Virtue, ed. George W. Carey (Lanham, MD: University
Press of America, 1984), p. 86.)
Even
Frank Meyer, uncharacteristically and in the heat of the ideological
fray, identified libertarianism as a "libertine impulse [which]
... raises the freedom of the individual ... to the status of an
absolute end."4 But this is an
absurd straw-man. Only an imbecile could ever hold that freedom
is the highest or indeed the only principle or end of life. Freedom
is necessary to, and integral with, the achievement of any of man's
ends. The libertarian agrees completely with Acton and with Meyer
himself that freedom is the highest political end, not the
highest end of man per se; indeed, it would be difficult to render
such a position in any sense meaningful or coherent.
The
confusion here, and the basic problem with conservatives' understanding
of libertarianism, is that libertarianism per se does not offer
a comprehensive way of life or system of ethics, as do, say, conservatism
and Marxism. This does not mean in any sense that I am personally
opposed to a comprehensive ethical system; quite the contrary. It
simply means that libertarianism is strictly a political
philosophy, confined to what the use of violence should be in social
life. (As I have written above, libertarianism maintains that violence
should be strictly limited to the defense of the rights of person
and property against violent intervention.) Libertarianism does
not talk about virtue in general (apart from the virtue of maintaining
liberty), simply because it is not equipped to do so. As Professor
Tibor Machan has pointed out, libertarianism is a "political
doctrine ... a claim as to what is permissible for human beings
to do toward each other by means of the aid of force or its threat,
nothing more." (Tibor
R. Machan, "Libertarianism: The Principle of Liberty,"
in Freedom
and Virtue, ed. George W. Carey (Lanham, MD: University
Press of America, 1984), pp. 37-38.)
This
does not mean that individual libertarians are unconcerned with
moral principles or with broader philosophical issues. As a political
theory, libertarianism is a coalition of adherents from all manner
of philosophic (or non-philosophic) positions including emotivism,
hedonism, Kantian a priorism, and many others. My own position
grounds libertarianism on a natural rights theory embedded in a
wider system of Aristotelian-Lockean natural law and a realist ontology
and metaphysics.5 But although those
of us taking this position believe that it only provides a satisfactory
groundwork and basis for individual liberty, this is an argument
within the libertarian camp about the proper basis and grounding
of libertarianism rather than about the doctrine itself.
More
characteristic of Meyer was his identification of the libertarian
pole of conservatism, not with liberty as the only goal for man,
but with classical liberalism. Nineteenth-century liberalism rested
its defense of liberty not on natural rights or moral principle,
but on social utility and in the case of the classical economists
economic efficiency. The classical liberal defense of liberty
tended to be based not on the perception of freedom as essential
to the true nature of man, but on universal ignorance of the truth.
In some cases the approach is taken that knowledge of ethical truth
would necessarily require coercion, so that freedom can only rest
on the impossibility of knowing what virtuous action might be. In
this way the classical liberal, or moral "libertine,"
agrees from the other side of the coin with the traditionalists:
they acknowledge that if we only knew what the good might be we
would have to enforce it upon everyone.6
Meyer's
strictures against the utilitarian classical liberals were sound
and well taken. As he put it, nineteenth-century liberalism "stood
for individual freedom, but its utilitarian philosophical attitude
denied the validity of moral ends firmly based on the constitution
of being. Thereby, with this denial of an ultimate sanction for
the inviolability of the person, liberalism destroyed the very foundations
of its defense of the person as primary in political and social
matters."7 Meyer's mistake was
in thinking that he was thereby indicting libertarianism per se
when he was really attacking the classical liberal world-view underlying
the underpinning for its own particular libertarian position. As
Machan points out, "Classical liberalism may properly be regarded
as far more than a political theory such as libertarianism, since
it is philosophically broader, involving ideas about the nature
of man, God, value, science, etc. Although libertarianism may indeed
be defensible from a very specific philosophical perspective, it
is not itself that perspective." (Ibid.,
57.)
Thus,
Frank Meyer's strictures against libertarianism for neglecting virtue
do not properly apply against libertarianism per se, since qua
libertarianism it does not attempt to offer any theory except a
political one; it is not competent to provide a general theory of
ethics. His criticisms do properly apply to the broader ethical
outlook of the utilitarian-emotivist-hedonic wing of libertarians,
but not to the philosophy of the Aristotelian-Lockean natural rights
wing. In other words, although he failed to realize it, Frank Meyer
was writing, not as a fusionist attacking libertarianism, but as
a natural law-natural rights libertarian attacking the philosophic
perspective of the utilitarian-hedonic libertarians. In short, Meyer
really wrote from within the libertarian perspective.
The
utilitarian strain is particularly strong, in contemporary America,
among the Chicago School wing of free-market economics: Milton Friedman,
James Buchanan, Gordon Tullock, Ronald Coase, Harold Demsetz, et
al. In recent years, the assault of utilitarian "efficiency"
upon ethics has reached almost grotesque proportions in the Chicago
School economic theory of law advanced by Professor Richard Posner
and his disciples. The Posnerites deny that law should have (or
does have) anything to do with ethical principles; instead, the
question of who should be considered a tortfeasor or liable for
invading property rights should be decided purely on the basis of
social "efficiency." Property rights themselves, according
to the Chicagoites, should be allocated on the basis, not of justice,
but of alleged efficiency considerations.8
Indeed, some of the Chicagoite ventures, e.g. on economic analysis
of sex and marriage, read like bizarre parodies of economics run
riot, the sort of caricatures of economists in which Dickens was
fond of indulging.9
TRADITIONALISTS
AND THE COMMUNITY
For
traditionalists the central object of concern and of imputed rights
or obligations is the "community"; for libertarians it
is the individual. For libertarians, communities are simply voluntary
groupings of individuals, with no independent rights or powers of
their own. The unit of analysis, the only entity that thinks, values,
makes choices, is the individual. Again, there is no middle ground
here; and, again, Frank Meyer's "fusionism" is squarely
in the libertarian camp. Meyer begins his magnum opus with
methodological individualism; only individuals exist, and "society"
is only an abstraction for a set of relations between them. A crucial
error of twentieth-century thought, as Meyer points out, is that
"the set of relationships between man itself constitutes a
real entity an organism, as it were called ‘society,’
with a life and with moral duties and rights of its own. This hypostatization
of the sum of relations between men, this calling into being of
an organism as the value-center of political theory, is the essential
note of the doctrines which underlie and inspire every powerful
political movement of the 20th century..."10
So
far, so good, and most conservatives as well as libertarians would
agree. But then Meyer applies this analysis fully to the traditionalists'
favored concept of "community":
For "community"
(except as it is freely created by free individual persons), community
conceived as a principle of social order prior and superior to
the individual person, can justify any oppression of individual
persons so long as it is carried out in the name of "community"
or society or of its agent, the state.
Meyer
goes on to warn that
this is the
principle of collectivism; and it remains the principle of collectivism
even though the New Conservatives who speak of "community"
would prefer a congeries of communities ... to the totalizing
and equalizing national or international community which is the
goal of the collectivists. This is to their credit.... But what
the New Conservatives will not see is that there are no solid
grounds on which the kind of "community" they propose
as the end towards which social existence should be ordered can
be defended against the kind of "community" the collectivists
propose.... Caught within the pattern of concepts inherited from
classical political theory, they [the New Conservatives] cannot
free themselves from the doctrine that men find their true being
only as organic parts of a social entity, from which and in terms
of which their lives take value. Hence the New Conservatives cannot
effectively combat the essential political error of collectivist
liberalism: its elevation of corporate society, and the state
which stands as the enforcing agency of corporate society, to
the level of final political ends.11
"Total
state and ‘plurality of communities,’" Meyer concludes, "do
not constitute an antithesis; rather they are variants ... of the
same denial of the primary value, on this earth, of the individual
person."12
The
only genuine community among men, Meyer goes on to say, is the result
of free and voluntary individual interactions, not of the aridity
and despotism of state-imposed "community." The problems
which traditionalists like Kirk and Nisbet ascribe to "loss
of community," Meyer points out, really stem from "an
excess of state-enforced community."13
In contrast, Meyer eloquently holds up associations of free persons:
To
assert the freedom and independence of the individual person implies
no denial of the value of mutuality, of association and common action
between persons. It only denies the value of coerced association.
When men are free, they will of course form among themselves a multitude
of associations to fulfill common purposes when common purposes
exist. The potential relationships between one man and other men
are multifarious; but they are relationships between independent,
conscious, self-acting beings. They are not the interactions of
cells of a larger organism. When they are voluntary, freely chosen
to fulfill the mutual needs of independent beings, they are fruitful
and indeed essential. But ... each man will find, as a free being,
the relationships congenial to his specific needs.14
We
conclude that, in this crucial area of political thought as well,
Frank Meyer was not a "fusionist" but quite simply a trenchant
individualist and libertarian. Always he championed the primacy
of the individual, of his rights and liberty, as against all social
institutions. Cooperation between men was fine, provided that it
be free and voluntary; any coercion is a mockery of genuine community,
and the state is particularly menacing whenever it goes beyond the
use of force to guard individual rights against the coercion of
others. This is no "third way," but simply libertarianism.
TRADITION
AND REASON
In
choosing political or social positions, two alternatives have been
offered: custom or tradition on the one hand, the use of reason
to discern natural laws and rights on the other; in short, tradition,
or the use of reason to discern abstract principles on which to
stand one's ground outside the customs of time and place. Here,
too, is a profound difference between traditionalist and libertarian.
The traditionalist is at bottom an empiricist, distrusting rational
abstraction and principle, and wrapping himself in the custom of
his particular society. The libertarian, as Lord Acton stated, "wishes
for what ought to be, irrespective of what is." Or, as Gertrude
Himmelfarb has summed up Acton's viewpoint, "the past was allowed
no authority except as it happened to conform to morality."15
Here
again, Meyer comes down basically on the libertarian side. Arguing
against the traditionalists, he points out that there are many traditions;
and how but by the use of reason can we decide between them? Time
can hallow evil as well as good; it is no accident that the unreconstructed
Stalinists in Russia are now dubbed the "conservatives."
Surely they are, in the traditionalist sense. But if we are stuck
within tradition, whatever it may happen to be, how do we know whether
it is good, indifferent, or evil? Only principle can judge, can
decide between, traditions; and reason is our key to the discovery
of principle. Meyer puts it succinctly:
Against
both the prevailing mode of thought and the New Conservative criticism,
which are, each in its own way, appeals to experience, I propose
the claims of reason and the claims of the tradition of reason.
I do not assume that reason is the sole possession of a single living
generation, or of any man in any generation. I do assume that it
is the active quality whereby men (starting with a due respect for
the fundamental moral knowledge of ends and values incorporated
in tradition) have the power to distinguish what ought to be from
what is, the ideal from the dictates of power. Upon these assumptions,
I shall attempt to reestablish, in contemporary contexts, principles
drawn from the nature of man ....16
And
again:
... there
is a higher sanction than prescription and tradition; there are
standards of truth and good by which men must make their ultimate
judgment of ideas and institutions; in which case, reason, operating
against the background of tradition, is the faculty upon which
they must depend in making that judgment.... To recognize that
there is a need to distinguish between traditions, to choose between
the good and the evil in tradition, requires recognition of the
preeminent role (not, lest I be misunderstood, the sole role)
of reason in distinguishing among the possibilities which have
been open to men since the serpent tempted Eve.... But this is
exactly what the New Conservatives refuse to recognize. The refusal
to recognize the role of reason, the refusal to acknowledge that,
in the immense flow of tradition, there are in fact diverse elements
that must be distinguished on a principled basis ... is a central
attribute of New Conservative thought. It is this which separates
the New Conservatism from the conservatism of principle....17
While
I contend that Meyer's position is essentially libertarian, he evidently
waffles in places in an uncharacteristically murky manner. If reason
is needed to decide between traditions, to judge good and evil,
in what sense does reason not have the "sole" role here?
In other places, Meyer, with evident inconsistency, speaks of tradition
as properly a "guide and governor of reason," or of reason operating
"within tradition." Here, Meyer is trying desperately
to establish a third, fusionist way between libertarianism and traditionalism,
but at the price of inner contradiction and theoretical confusion.
If reason is indispensable to judge good and evil and to decide
between traditions, then obviously it cannot operate within
tradition. For either reason is the ultimate arbiter, or tradition
is; it is impossible to have it both ways. Fusionism has ineluctably
run afoul of the law of the excluded middle (the product of reason,
I might note).
Can
we make any sense at all of Meyer's vague references to the proper
role of tradition? Perhaps there is a clue in the clause, "starting
with a due respect for the fundamental moral knowledge of ends and
values incorporated in tradition." Perhaps this simply means
that, if we wish to learn moral truth, we had better begin
by finding out what the theorists of the present and past have had
to say about it. This is not placing tradition above reason; it
is simply employing common sense. If one wants to learn anything
about the world, it saves time and energy, and adds a great number
of insights, to say the least, to learn what has been written and
thought on the subject, rather than each individual's attempting
to spin out all knowledge from scratch. If Meyer or anyone else
should think that the libertarian position is like Swift's spider,
to spin everything out of one's head a priori without reference
to thought of the past or present, then this would be only a bizarre
caricature. Libertarians, one would hope, are intelligent human
beings, and not solipsistic cretins.
Are
there any other obeisances that libertarians may properly make to
tradition? Simply to say that, in life, not all questions
are matters of moral principle. There are numerous areas of life
where people live by habit and custom, where the custom can neither
be called moral or immoral, and where pursuit of custom eases the
tensions of social life and makes for a more comfortable and harmonious
society. It would be a false and perverted rationalism to say that
any custom which cannot be proven on some other ground to be "rational"
must go by the board. We can then conclude as follows: (a) that
custom must be voluntarily upheld and not enforced by coercion;
and (b) that people would be well advised (although not forced)
to begin with a presumption in favor of custom, other things being
equal. In a world, for example, where every man takes off his hat
in the presence of ladies, an individual should be free not to do
so, but at the risk of being generally judged a boor. If, on the
other hand, this person's constitution is such that he would be
likely to suffer a bad cold by exposing his pate, then we have here
a higher moral consideration overriding the social harmonies of
custom.
Returning
to Frank Meyer, I still believe that the basic thrust of his fusionism
in this dispute, as incoherent as it ultimately may be, is libertarian.
Reason turns out to be decisive, and it seems to me that the bows
to tradition are more ceremonial than substantive. I suspect, without
being able to prove it, that Meyer was bowing here to what he deeply
felt to be the exigencies of organizing a conservative movement
which would include traditionalists, libertarians, fusionists. In
short, that in this as in some other instances, Meyer was writing
with movement rather than strictly intellectual exigencies in mind.
Meyer
has a sensitive discussion of Burke which I think is relevant here.
In discussing the ambiguities in Burke's thought between principle
and prescription the very problem here under discussion
he at one point explains the prescriptive side as emanating from
Burke the statesman. The New Conservative disciples of Burke, Meyer
points out, "are not statesmen like Burke; the prudential choice
between immediate practical alternatives, which is the proper task
of the statesman, leads in the scholar, the political theorist,
to a theoretical impasse."18
I
submit that, on this particular issue, Meyer was writing as a statesman
instead of a political theorist.19
Another
reason that I believe Meyer to be at heart a libertarian on this
issue of principle vs. tradition is the stance he took on the related
question of radical change vs. maintenance of the status quo. For
as the post-New Deal system becomes ensconced in American life,
many conservatives have increasingly become content to retain that
system and simply to tinker with marginal reform. In a sense as
good traditionalists, they aspire only to preserve the essential
status quo and to keep the society from becoming more collectivist
and more egalitarian than it already is. But Frank Meyer would have
none of this. Until the end of his life he insisted on pursuing
the unswerving goal of repealing the New Deal system root and branch,
in fact, to repeal most of the accretions of statism in American
life since the Civil War. Meyer's
famous bitter critiques of Abraham Lincoln were not simply exercises
in antiquarian disputation, nor of course were they defenses of
racism and slavery.20 Meyer saw clearly
that the changes Lincoln wrought in American society were the decisive
shift toward the centralizing and despotic nation-state, changes
that were built upon by the Progressive era, by Woodrow Wilson,
and finally by the New Deal. To Meyer, the goal of a truly principled
conservative movement was to repeal all that, and to establish a
just polity.
But
this means that Meyer was truly a radical conservative, that is,
someone who desired root and systematic change; he was in radical
opposition to the statist status quo. Hence he took his stand, once
again, with the libertarians, who are also principled radicals,
and with much the same principles.
THE
ROLE AND NATURE OF ORDER
Another
critical dispute between traditionalists and libertarians is over
the role and the nature of order. To the traditionalist, order is
the overriding consideration, and order can only be achieved by
a massive imposition of state coercion. To the traditionalist, liberty
is arrant chaos and disorder, and the libertarian is someone who
wishes to sacrifice order on the altar of liberty. The libertarian,
on the contrary, has a diametrically opposed view. To him, the only
genuine order among men proceeds out of free and voluntary interaction:
a lasting order that emerges out of liberty rather than by suppressing
it. With Proudhon, the libertarian hails Liberty as the "Mother,
not the Daughter of Order." In this way, the libertarian sees
the harmonious interaction of free people as akin to the harmonious
interaction of natural entities that is summed up as "natural
law."
State
coercion, on the other hand, is viewed by the libertarian as a pseudo-order
which actually results in disorder and chaos. State-imposed order
is "artificial" and destructive of the harmony provided
by following the natural order. Economic science has long shown
that individuals, pursuing their own interests in the marketplace,
will benefit everyone. The free market has been shown to be the
only genuine economic order, while state coercion hampering that
market only subverts genuine order and causes dislocation, general
impoverishment and, eventually, economic chaos. Moreover, one of
our most distinguished free-market economists, F.A. Hayek, has extended
the concept of what he has trenchantly termed "spontaneous
order" to include many other activities than the economic sphere.21
Hayek has pointed out that the evolution of human language itself
was not imposed by coercion from above but emerged from the free
and voluntary interaction of individual persons. To use a noted
phrase of Hayek's, language, the origin of money, and the market
itself were products or byproducts of human action, but not of human
design.
An
eloquent statement of the libertarian view of order was given us
by Paine:
A great part
of that order which reigns among mankind is not the effect of
government. It had its origin in the principles of society and
the natural constitution of man. It existed prior to government,
and would exist if the formality of government was abolished.
The mutual dependence and reciprocal interest which man has upon
man, and all parts of a civilized community upon each other, create
that great chain of connection which holds it together. The landholder,
the farmer, the manufacturer, the merchant, the tradesman, and
every occupation, prospers by the aid which each receives from
the other, and from the whole. Common interest regulates their
concerns, and forms their laws; and the laws which common usage
ordains, have a greater influence than the laws of government.
In fine, society performs for itself almost every thing which
is ascribed to government.22
As
to Frank Meyer, it is clear throughout his work that he believes
in the order of liberty rather than in state coercion. In reply
to the traditionalists, he points out that all social systems have
some sort of order, and that the relevant question, then,
is not: order or no order? but what kind of order?23
The order he evidently believes in is one of freedom: of the protection
of the rights of person and property, and of a free market economy
in short, the order of libertarianism. Once again, "fusionism"
turns out to be libertarianism in another guise.
POPULISM
VS. ELITISM
Finally,
a fascinating problem within conservatism transcends the traditionalist-fusionist-libertarian
triad altogether, and furnishes an example of the triad's insufficiency
in encompassing problems within conservative thought. Broadly, this
is the question of "populism" vs. "elitism,"
that is, does one pin one's hopes for proper social change and a
just society on the mass of the public or on an elite minority?
Or, to put it another way, who is The Enemy? Which social groups
or institutions constitute the permanent menace and enemy to be
combatted and guarded against?
Originally,
the traditionalists (Kirk, Viereck, Wilheimsen, et al) could be
placed squarely in the elitist camp. The masses were The Enemy,
as I see their views, and a strong state and repressive institutions
headed by the state were needed to keep the masses in check. The
result was an inherent pessimism about the future. For, since the
late nineteenth century, the masses have voted, and therefore the
conservative cause has seemed ineluctably doomed.24
Libertarians,
on the other hand, tended to be far more populist. To libertarians,
the masses are not The Enemy. The Enemy, in the dramatic terms of
Spencer and Nock, is the state. This does not mean that libertarians
naively believe that the masses are necessarily wise or good. It
is simply that the mass of the public spends most of its time on
the business of making a living; their political interests are fitful
and evanescent. At their worst, the masses may conduct a lynching
or two, but then they are back to their daily affairs. But the state
consists of full-time professionals in coercion. It is the business
of the state apparatus never to rest. So the state, rather than
the masses, is the permanent Enemy. This has meant, in the libertarian
tradition, that either the state is to be abolished, or, if retained,
that it be kept small and weighed down with fierce restrictions
and greeted by permanent social hostility. Jefferson's "eternal
vigilance [as] the price of liberty" was directed against the
state.25
But
it is not just that libertarians direct their fire against the state.
They also perceive that the masses, as well as numerous individuals,
are oppressed by the state, that the state benefits a minority power
elite at the expense of most of those it purports to help. In recent
years, as part of this analysis, economists have shown that the
poor are injured rather than helped by the welfare state. But further,
statism deeply violates the basic laws of man's nature. For, if
the state's interest really clashes with the majority of the people,
with their freedom, happiness and prosperity, then education of
the masses in this truth will be likely to result eventually in
libertarian victory, a victory which would replicate and extend
the partial victories of their classical liberal forebears in the
eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
The
original correlation of traditionalist with the elite and libertarian
with populism, however, has long been swept away. Since the 1960s,
traditionalist conservatives have become increasingly pro-populist,
culminating in the current New Right. Partly, as George Nash indicates
in his history of the modern conservative movement, the shift in
attitude toward the masses reflected a change in historical context.
In the 1940s and 1950s conservatives were an embattled minority,
and so saw themselves as an eternally beleaguered group fending
off both state and mass. But as conservatives began to grow and
achieve political victories in the 1960s and 1970s, their attitude
toward the masses swung one hundred eighty degrees, and we began
to hear of a "silent majority" who knew in their hearts
that conservativism was right.26 In
addition, such new traditionalists as Willmoore Kendall stressed
the virtually absolute "rights" of the putative majority
of the public.
In
recent years, New Right publicist Jude Wanniski has attained the
apotheosis of populism. As with Kendall, Wanniski and New Right
populism far exceeds the libertarian bent, which is only a long-run
tendency, and which denies the majority any power to interfere with
the rights of the individual. Wanniski goes to the extent of declaring,
in some sort of Hegelian fashion, that history consists of the masses
fulfilling their will. In striking contrast to the original traditionalists
as well as to libertarians, Wanniski proclaims that the masses never
need to be educated; on the contrary, they are all-wise. The masses,
at any time in history, know all. The task of political leadership
is to articulate the wisdom of the masses and to bring them what
they want, since what they want is always wise and right. Specifically,
Wanniski sees the cunning of history as marching inevitably toward
(a) a world state, and (b) greater and greater democracy. Democracy
becomes a positive and overriding good, in this view, because it
more easily fulfills the inevitably wise and good desires of the
masses.27
In
the face of this ultra-populism, the libertarian position is quite
modest and commonsensical. It holds that the long-run interest of
the masses and their basic human nature, is, in reality, opposed
to statism, but this hardly guarantees instantaneous or even eventual
success. It certainly doesn't imply the eternal wisdom of the general
public.
As
far as I know, Frank Meyer never addressed himself specifically
to this question, but I think that his basic position was close
to the libertarian one. Democracy was cogently criticized, and warned
against as a menace to liberty, but so too was the State as well
as more particular "communities." Probably Meyer, along
with most other conservatives, grew more optimistic about the masses
as conservatism gained political strength, but so far as that goes
this is both an understandable and proper response to changing political
realities. The point is that, holding the liberty and the rights
of the individual as paramount, Meyer would never have succumbed
to the adoration of the masses now so prevalent in the conservative
movement. Once again, even though the familiar triad is not very
helpful here, Meyer's "fusionist" position is basically
libertarian.
FUSIONISM
IS A MYTH
I
conclude from a study of its founder and leading exponent that "fusionism"
does not really exist. In all the crucial aspects of political philosophy,
Frank Meyer was a libertarian. There is no triad, but only two very
different and largely antagonistic poles. In the one area where
Meyer differed substantively from the libertarian position, reason
as being "within tradition," I submit that the attempt
was so baldly fallacious that it can only be explained as a heroic
or desperate (depending on one's point of view) attempt to find
a face-saving formula to hold both very different parts of the conservative
movement together in a unified ideological and political movement.
To use Marxian jargon, fusionism often seems like an attempt to
paper over the contradictions within conservatism. I venture to
assert that, if we were living in a very different kind of society
where there was no political strife or movements, and political
disputes were strictly confined to political theory in the cloistered
groves of academe, there would have been no fusionism and Meyer
would have acknowledged himself as a libertarian, of the natural
rights variety. In short, I believe that fusionism is a "myth"
in the Sorelian sense, an organizing principle to hold two very
disparate wings of a political movement together and to get them
to act in a unified way. Intellectually, the concept must be judged
a failure.
Notes
- Frank S.
Meyer, In
Defense of Freedom (Chicago: Henry Regnery, 1962), 50,
55.
- For the
historical record of the criminality of rulers of state, see Pitirim
A. Sorokin and Walter A. Lunden, Power
and Morality: Who Shall Guard the Guardians? (Boston:
Porter Sargent, 1959).
- Friedrich
A. Hayek, The
Road to Serfdom (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1944), 136.
- Frank S.
Meyer, "Libertarianism or Libertinism?," National Review
21 (Sept. 9, 1969): 910.
- This is
essentially the position of Tibor Machan, Eric Mack, Douglas Rasmussen,
Douglas den Uyl, Williamson Evers, Randy E. Barnett, Anthony Fressola,
George H. Smith, and a host of other young libertarian political
philosophers.
- The free
market economist Milton Friedman, from the classical liberal perspective,
has explicitly taken that very position. See Machan's essay in
this volume, 'Libertarianism," 40-41.
- Meyer,
Defense, 1-2.
- Thus see
Richard A. Posner, Economic
Analysis of Law, 2nd ed. (Boston: Little Brown, 1977);
Posner, "Utilitarianism, Economics, and Legal Theory,"
Journal of Legal Studies 8 (January 1979): 103-140; Harold
B. Demsetz, "Ethics and Efficiency in Property Rights Systems,"
in Mario J. Rizzo, ed., Time,
Uncertainty, and Disequilibrium (Lexington, Mass: Lexington
Books, 1979), 97-116. For critiques of Chicagoite Posnerism from
a rights-perspective, see Ronald M. Dworkin, "Is Wealth a Value?"
Journal of Legal Studies (March 1980): 191-226; Richard
A. Epstein, "The Static Conception of the Common Law," ibid.,
253-76; Rizzo, "Law Amid Flux: The Economics of Negligence and
Strict Liability in Tort,' ibid., 291-318; Charles
Fried, "The Laws of Change: The Cunning of Reason in Moral and
Legal History," ibid., 335-53; Gerald P. O'Driscoll, Jr.,
"Justice, Efficiency, and the Economic Analysis of Law: A Comment
on Fried," ibid., 355-66; John B. Egger, "Comment: Efficiency
is Not a Substitute for Ethics," in Rizzo, ed., op. cit.,
117-26; Rizzo, "Uncertainty, Subjectivity, and the Economic Analysis
of Law,' ibid., 71-90; Murray N. Rothbard, "The Myth of
Efficiency," ibid., 91-96.
- For an
example, see Richard B. McKenzie and Gordon Tullock, The
New World of Economics: Explorations into the Human Experience
(Homewood, Ill.: Richard D. Irwin, 1975). Actually, Wilde's
quip about the cynic applies equally well to these Chicagoite
economists: they "who know the price of everything, and the value
of nothing."
- Meyer,
Defense, 28.
- Ibid.,
130-32.
- Ibid.,
144.
- Ibid.,
130.
- Ibid.,
146-47. For a penetrating critique of the worship of the polis
as against individual persons in classical political theory, see
ibid., 82-87, 136.
- Gertrude
Himmelfarb, Lord
Acton: a Study in Conscience and Politics (Chicago: University
of Chicago Press, 1962), 204-05. Or, as one philosopher has defined
natural law: it "defends the rational dignity of the human individual
and his right and duty to criticize by word and deed any existent
institution or social structure in terms of those universal moral
principles which can be apprehended by the individual intellect
alone." John Wild, Plato's Modem Enemies and the Theory of
Natural Law (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1953),
176.
- Meyer,
Defense, 11.
- Ibid.,
41, 44-45.
- Ibid.,
40.
- I do not
write this to denigrate Frank Meyer the man. It is certainly arguable
that organizing and leading an ideological movement may be just
as admirable as constructing an edifice of political theory. Meyer
was a committed man, as well as a theorist and scholar; he was
not content only to discover good and evil. Believing that twentieth-century
man had taken a tragically wrong road, he believed it his duty
to organize to change that road. He believed it incumbent upon
him to act on his theoretical insights.
- Frank
S. Meyer, "Lincoln
Without Rhetoric," National Review 17 (Aug. 24, 1965):
725; idem, "Again
on Lincoln," National Review 18 (Jan. 25, 1966): 71,
85.
- See in
particular F. A. Hayek, Law,
Legislation, and Liberty, Vol. 1: Rules and Order
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1973). Perhaps the earliest
use of the phrase "spontaneous order," where the concept
is developed much as Hayek would do later, and applied to the
diffusion of scientific knowledge, is in Michael Polanyi, Tbe
Logic of Liberty (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1951).
- Thomas
Paine, "Rights of Man, Part Second," in P. Foner, ed., The
Complete Writings of Thomas Paine (New York: Citadel Press,
1945), 1: 357.
- Thus, see
Meyer, Defense, 64-65.
- Among Chicago
free-market economists, George Stigler has come to the position
that liberty is irretrievably doomed so long as universal suffrage
exists. Since the prospects for repealing universal suffrage seem
about as favorable as for the restoration of the Stuarts, pessimism
becomes inevitable.
- For the
influence of Cato's
Letters and other radical English libertarians of this
stripe on the American revolutionaries, see Bernard Bailyn, The
Ideological Origins of the American Revolution (Cambridge,
Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1967).
- George
H. Nash, The
Conservative Intellectual Movement in America Since 1945 (New
York: Basic Books, 1976).
-
Jude Wanniski,
The
Way
the World Works (New York: Simon and Schuster,
1978). On the evidence of the book, the point of all this seems
to be specifically political: that is, to argue why a Republican
Presidential candidate who calls for tax reduction, maintenance
of government spending at the current level, and a balanced budget
is not being an irresponsible demagogue. He is not because the
masses, on the evidence of Gallup polls, etc., want all three,
and therefore they must be right. It is the task of conservative
intellectuals to find out why they are right, and it is at this
point that Wanniski brings in the deus ex machina of the
"Laffer curve," which purports to resolve these contradictions.
But in this paper we are concerned only with the historical-theoretical
underpinnings for this political gimcrackery.
Murray
N. Rothbard (1926-1995), the founder of modern libertarianism and
the dean of the Austrian School of economics, was the author of
The
Ethics of Liberty and For
a New Liberty and many
other books and articles. He was also academic vice president
of the Ludwig von Mises Institute and the Center for Libertarian
Studies.
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© 2002 Ludwig von Mises Institute
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