The View From 1776

From the closing decades of the 19th century through mid-20th century, academics (who were heavily influenced by the socialistic materialism espoused in the great German universities, then regarded as the ultimate source of PhD degrees) taught a distorted version of American history.  That version centered around the false idea that the Declaration of Independence represented the egalitarian spirit of the French socialist revolution and that the Constitution was a reactionary effort to kill egalitarianism.  Notable among those academics were Vernon L. Parrington (Main Currents in American Thought) and Charles A. Beard (An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution of the United States).

Because academics of that era, just as is true today, favored the collectivism of the socialistic welfare state, they identified the 17th and 18th century Enlightenments exclusively with the socialistic French Revolution.

Robert Curry sets about dismantling that academic fraud.

Sorting out the Enlightenments
By Robert Curry

A Review of Gertrude Himmelfarb’s The Roads To Modernity: The British, French, And American Enlightenments (Knopf, 2004)

“Can you recommend a book that sorts out the various Enlightenments and makes it clear why I should care?”

The Roads To Modernity ought to be the perfect answer to that question.  As you might anticipate because of the author’s sterling reputation, where it is good it is very, very good indeed.  Unfortunately, although the author accomplishes the task brilliantly in two magnificent chapters, she also creates confusion in a third chapter.  Despite the problems with that third chapter, The Roads To Modernity remains the best answer to the question, and even the chapter that goes awry has much to recommend it to the alert reader.
The two outstanding chapters are the ones on the French and the American Enlightenments.  They are models of brevity, clarity, and scholarly command of the subject.  The French and the American Enlightenments are brought into sharp focus, and their profound differences are made clear.

Prof. Himmelfarb brilliantly contrasts the French Enlightenment, which she terms “the Ideology of Reason,” and the American Enlightenment, termed by her as “the Politics of Liberty:”

“The idea of liberty…did not elicit anything like the passion or commitment [from the French] that reason did. Nor did it inspire the philosophes to engage in a systematic analysis of the political and social institutions that would promote and protect liberty.”
This passage is an example of the book at its best.  The philosophes and the Founders were working in very different directions on very different projects.  These differences help explain the very different outcomes of the American and the French Revolutions.
Because the study of the Enlightenment has traditionally focused on France, these two chapters provide the interested reader with an opportunity to make a great leap forward not just in understanding the Enlightenments, but also in understanding America.  Many Americans who take a keen interest in American history do not realize how much America’s Founding was an Enlightenment project.  They are surprised to learn that The Declaration of Independence, the Constitution and The Federalist are among the greatest achievements of the Enlightenment.  Prof. Himmelfarb’s thoughtful analysis makes a powerful case for the historical significance and the uniqueness of the American Enlightenment.

Prof. Himmelfarb also ably demonstrates that the philosophes’ concept of reason explains their disdain for the common people.  Voltaire, for example, never concealed his disdain for the people, habitually referring to them as “la canaille” (the rabble), and Diderot wrote that “the common people are incredibly stupid.” The philosophes’ statements about their fellow citizens are very different from Jefferson’s ringing declaration that “all men are created equal…endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights…” What made for this difference?  Prof. Himmelfarb correctly assigns the difference to the role of two Enlightenment conceptions, the moral sense and common sense.  Moral sense and common sense doctrines were central to the American Enlightenment and absent from the French Enlightenment:

“The moral sense and common sense…attributed to all individuals gave to all people, including the common people, a common humanity and a common fund of moral and social obligations.  The French idea of reason was not available to the common people and had no such moral or social component.”

Much ink has been spilled on the question of why the French and the American Revolutions had such different outcomes.  Here you have a key difference, stated with brilliant clarity.  The difference between the philosophes and the Founders is this: the primacy of reason versus the primacy of the moral sense and common sense.

However, always pairing the moral sense and common sense, as Prof. Himmelfarb very correctly does, raises a problem.  The moral sense and the common sense schools of philosophy are the two schools that make up the Scottish Enlightenment.  This is so well established that the heading for a chapter on the Scottish Enlightenment writes itself:  “The Moral Sense and Common Sense.” There is no need for the brilliant defense Prof. Himmelfarb provides for “the Ideology of Reason” as the proper heading for the French and for “the Politics of Liberty” as the proper one for the Americans.  Yet there is no chapter on the Scottish Enlightenment.  Instead, there is a single chapter combining the British and the Scottish Enlightenments under the single label of the British Enlightenment.

The Scottish Enlightenment was a response to developments in England.  As Isaac Kramnick wrote,

“The beginnings are marked in Britain by the Glorious Revolution in 1688…as well as by the writings of Locke and the publication in 1687 of Newton’s Principia.”

The Scots enthusiastically entered into the scientific project of the Enlightenment but they were alarmed and aroused by the Lockean one.  The moral sense and common sense schools of philosophy were their response to Locke.  In the words of Garry Wills:
“Man was seen, after Locke, as determined by the impact of pleasure and pain upon his senses.  [Thomas] Reid saw this as a challenge to the certainty of knowledge.  [Francis] Hutcheson saw it as a threat to the very possibility of virtue.”

Reid founded the common sense school and Hutcheson the moral sense school to meet the Lockean threat.  Subsequently, the Scots handed their twin doctrines on to the Americans who used them in their “systematic analysis of the political and social institutions that would promote and protect liberty.” The Scots had done the brilliant theoretical work that opened the way for the success of the Founders’ systematic analysis.  A chapter on the Scottish Enlightenment placed between a chapter on Locke and the British Enlightenment and the chapter on the American Enlightenment would have told that story quite clearly.  The design of the book makes clear that Prof. Himmelfarb wants to tell a different story. 

The chapter on the British Enlightenment is over three times as lengthy as either the chapter on the French or the one on the Americans.  Remarkably, there is a lengthy section in the British chapter in which Prof. Himmelfarb argues that Edmund Burke is an Enlightenment thinker, though she admits that he is generally assigned to the counter-Enlightenment.  Even more remarkably, there is an even lengthier section on Methodism.  These are not merely brief digressions.  The Burke and the Methodism sections taken together are much longer than either the chapter on the French or the chapter on the American Enlightenments. 

In light of the number of pages dedicated to Burke and to Methodism, the page count dedicated to Locke is especially and curiously meager.  The apparent justification for the minimal attention paid to Locke is that Prof. Himmelfarb chooses to downplay Locke’s significance.  In what is almost an aside, Prof. Himmelfarb denies Locke and Newton the role traditionally assigned to them: 

“John Locke and Isaac Newton are often designated as the fathers of the British Enlightenment.  I myself would give that distinction to the third Earl of Shaftesbury…”
This claim is more than audacious.  Locke and Newton are not just “often designated” as the men who fathered the Enlightenment.  On this point the French, the Scots and the Americans of the Enlightenment are in agreement. 

As a result of the diminished role of Locke and Newton, no attempt is made to represent for us how Newton’s scientific discoveries, Locke’s philosophical writings and the possibilities suggested by the Glorious Revolution’s limits on governmental power combined to open up the new vision for Western civilization that we call the Enlightenment.  For, of course, if Newton and Locke do not have a central role, there is no need for Prof. Himmelfarb to make that attempt.

But why choose Shaftesbury instead for the central role?  The answer to that question is made clear simply by continuing the sentence just quoted above:

“…I myself would give that distinction to the third Earl of Shaftesbury, who was also the father of the Scottish Enlightenment although he was neither Scottish nor a professor.”

If Shaftesbury is the father of both the British Enlightenment and the Scottish Enlightenment, then a single chapter combining those two Enlightenments under the single label of the British Enlightenment would make sense.  The need for a separate chapter on the Scottish Enlightenment is eliminated—but at what a cost!  The problems are not limited to denying Newton and Locke their iconic status.  Starting the Enlightenment with Shaftesbury instead of Locke has the additional problem that Shaftesbury’s purpose was to refute Locke.  Like the Scots, Shaftesbury was alarmed and aroused to action by Locke, though he was careful not to name Locke in print, perhaps for personal reasons.  (Locke had personally supervised Shaftesbury’s education as a boy.) In a famous letter to a friend, Shaftesbury made his view of Locke quite clear:
“ ’Twas Mr. Locke that struck at all fundamentals, threw all order and virtue out of the world…Virtue, according to Mr. Locke, has no other measure, law, or rule, than fashion and custom: morality, justice, equity, depend only on law and will….And thus neither right nor wrong, virtue nor vice are anything in themselves.”

Like Shaftesbury, the Scots took up the task of refuting Locke and finding philosophical foundations for moral judgments and for knowledge claims as well.  Therefore it seems appropriate to place Shaftesbury where the Scots always placed themselves, that is, as one of the many thinkers following on Locke.

We are now able to envision the remodeling of the Enlightenment carried out by Prof. Himmelfarb in the chapter on the British Enlightenment.  She has raised an interior wall that moves Newton and Locke to the periphery, and taken down other walls in order to send out large additions, one to house Edmund Burke and another vast wing to make a place for Methodism.  The result is certainly strange.  What can be the purpose of these drastic assaults on its venerable floor plan?  Prof. Himmelfarb has spoken movingly of her lifelong interest in Burke.  Perhaps this massive Enlightenment remodeling project can best be understood by noting that it makes it easier to find a place for Burke within it.  Certainly an Enlightenment that includes Methodism, keeps Locke and Newton in the background and mixes the Scots and the British together is one from which it would be more difficult to justify excluding Burke.

Whether or not the problems with the chapter entitled “the British Enlightenment” are the result of a special effort to re-make the British Enlightenment so that it is sufficiently capacious to contain comfortably Edmund Burke, the chapter has much to offer the reader who is alert to the actual historical sequence.  If you read the chapter carefully, you are positioned to find within it much of value and much to admire.  If your style of reading would allow you to do such a thing, I recommend that you consider reading the chapters on the French and the Americans first.  With those two chapters under your belt, and armed with an awareness that the moral sense and common sense are the handiwork of the Scots, while reading you may begin to perceive within this unwieldy chapter many of the elements of two brilliant chapters, one on the British Enlightenment and one on the Scottish Enlightenment.

Professor Steven Pinker’s latest book, The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined, raises two important questions: has the world in fact become less violent, and has there been an evolutionary change in ways humans use their brains?

Read The Precious Steven Pinker, a critique by David Bentley Hart posted on the First Things website.  For a larger picture of Professor Pinker’s views, see this video of an interview with Stephen Colbert, this New York Times opinion article, this New York Times profile, and Professor Pinker’s letter to the editor in Commentary Magazine.

Has the world in fact become less violent?

Professor Pinker’s argument is largely based upon statistical analysis that shows a declining ratio of violent deaths, excluding accidents, to the world’s population.  In effect he agrees with the position attributed to Joseph Stalin: “One death is a tragedy, but a million deaths is just a statistic.”

He admits that millions of deaths occurred in the First and Second World Wars, the latter a product of Hitler’s National Socialism.  He also acknowledges that Stalin, Hitler, Mao, and Pol Pot liquidated hundreds of millions of their subjects.  Despite the horrific nature of these mass slaughters, professor Pinker sticks to his statistical analysis as proof that the world has become less violent.  While he doesn’t so state, the callousness of his position supports the prejudice of many people that more than six million Jews killed in Hitler’s Holocaust wasn’t a big deal.

Pinker’s optimistic assessment is a throwback to the 19th century idea of Progress, the burgeoning faith that liberal-progressive-socialism, guided by an academic elite, was inevitably propelling humanity toward social and political perfection.  Millions of deaths on the battlefields of Europe between 1914 and 1918 rudely shattered intellectuals’ naivete.  More recently Islamic jihad has been a call to look reality full in the face.

Has there been an evolutionary change in ways humans use their brains, a change that leads to reduced violence?

Harvard experimental psychologist Steven Pinker argues that every aspect of thought and emotion is rooted in brain structure and function, i.e., there is no such thing as the human soul.  Humans certainly were not created in the image of God.

Eliminating humans’ spiritual dimension eliminates the possibility of God’s existence.  If Professor Pinker and his atheistic colleagues can reduce the human soul to a large mass of physical nerves and synapses, they will have made humans little more than phenomenally complex computers contrived entirely by chance. 

The probability of that evolutionary chance, as a critic famously observed, is on the order of a tornado passing through a junk yard and producing a completely finished, fully functioning Boeing 747.

Professor Pinker implicitly espouses the liberal-progressive-socialistic faith that the world is evolving toward a single world government guided by an intellectual elite representing the best of brain-use evolution.  He explicitly credits evolving diplomatic policies among nations and creation of international organizations such as the League of Nations and the United Nations as the agents making our world less violent. 

He characterizes evolving brain-use as a process of learning to see issues from other people’s viewpoint.  This, of course, is an attribute of amoral multiculturalism, which preaches “tolerance,” meaning the absence of standards of conduct.  One can’t condemn Hitler, for example; one must see Nazi barbarity from his viewpoint.  One can’t condemn the 9/11 terrorists; we must see their actions from their viewpoint.

Evolutionary psychology, a materialistic philosophy, is the field of study in which Professor Pinker conceives his thesis.

Evolutionary psychology’s basic elements are, one, that human psychology first evolved in the late Paleolithic era, dubbed the era of evolutionary adaptation.  Evolutionary psychologists offer no explanation for how or why human psychology is supposed to have made its evolutionary appearance at that time.  As with all things evolutionary, things just happen by chance.

Two, in that Paleolithic period all human basic strategies for coping with getting food, clothing, shelter, and sexual relations for procreation appeared as the foundation of human behavior.

Three, those strategies, overlaid by materialistically evolved modifications, persist today as the underlying foundation for all human behavior.  That’s another way of stating that humans are just receptors of pleasure-pain stimuli from external conditions, that morality and individual responsibility are illusions imposed by those external conditions.

Professor Pinker does not recognize the pervasive and powerful pressure of Judeo-Christian morality in softening the barbarisms of European life after the 6th century fall of the Western Roman Empire.  He charges that Judeo-Christianity historically was responsible for genocide, toleration of slavery and rape, and prescription of the death penalty for idolatry, homosexuality, blasphemy, and working on the Sabbath. 

Christianity, as a matter of historical record, was the greatest source of steady improvements in Western life for more than a thousand years.  Among Judeo-Christian accomplishments were hospitals, education, food and shelter for the poor, as well as transformation of Roman latifundia across Europe from slavery into the feudal system that gave peasants hereditary rights to occupy and cultivate their family land.  19th century abolition of slavery in the British Empire and in the United States was the product of decades of Christian agitation.

David Berlinski, in The Devil’s Delusion: Atheism and its Scientific Pretensions, notes that there is absolutely no evidence whatever for the assumption that basic human psychology emerged via an evolutionary process in the Paleolithic period. 

It is an assumption plucked out of thin air. It is a variant of the standard justification for all of evolutionary doctrine: “it might have been,” or “we can speculate that this must have been,” or that “it must have been this way,” the rationalizations offered by evolutionists like God-hating Richard Dawkins.

Yet so-called scientists, who savagely condemn the faith of religious Jews and Christians, have no trouble taking the assertion of evolutionary psychology on blind faith.  Why?  Because it conforms to their preconceptions that God does not exist and that humans are the product of blind, material forces combining with random genetic variation to evolve new species. 

Another aspect of evolutionary psychology is scientists’ never ending struggle to demonstrate that they are so intelligent that they don’t need God as the Creator of the universe.  They can handle everything in their own minds, thank you; it suffices to gaze upon themselves worshipfully in the mirror every morning, congratulating themselves as lords of the universe.

Judeo-Christian morality, arising from spiritual religious struggles to understand the Will of God for individuals within society, is the opposite of liberal-progressive-socialistic determinism.  The one deals with individual responsibility.  The other deals with economic, cultural, and racial classes, presuming the right to impose its will upon them.

Judeo-Christian morality is the historical substance of Western civilization, dominant from the time of Roman Emperor Constantine in the 4th century AD. 

Judeo-Christianity’s essential aspect is recognition that every individual must answer to God for his actions, that every individual must strive always to do the right thing in dealing with his fellows.  Its political culmination was the English Glorious Revolution of 1689 that established the unwritten constitutional principle that even the monarch is subject to the higher law of God’s morality, that infringing upon individuals’ inherent personal liberties is grounds for forfeiture of his rulership.  Upon that foundation was our own Constitution based a century later.

Judeo-Christianity was unchallenged until the advent of scientistic, i.e., unscientific, socialism irrupting in the 1789 French Revolution, which introduced the Reign of Terror as an instrument of state political tyranny and culminated in Napoleon’s military conquest of Continental Europe.  Subsequent manifestations were the revolutions of 1830 and 1848, followed by the Bolshevik ascendency in Russia’s 1917 communist revolution and Hitler’s National Socialism in 1933.

Anarchist Mikhail Bakunin in 1872 described what life was to be under Karl Marx’s so-called scientific socialism, the progenitor of today’s liberal-progressivism espoused by the Democrat/Socialist Party:

“The government will not content itself with administering and governing the masses politically, as all governments do today.  It will administer the masses economically, concentrating in the hands of the State the production and division of wealth, the cultivation of land…All that will demand the reign of scientific intelligence, the most aristocratic, despotic, arrogant, and elitist of all regimes.  There will be a new class, a new hierarchy…the world will be divided into a minority ruling in the name of knowledge, and an immense ignorant majority.  And then, woe unto the mass of ignorant ones!”

Nancy Pelosi paraphrased this outlook when ram-rodding Obamacare through Congress.  Asked about the constitutionality of its provisions, she said that a Democrat/Socialist Party majority in Congress could legislate anything it wanted, apparently without regard to constitutional precedent or overwhelming public disagreement.  She also opined that the voters are too ignorant to know what is best for them, that they would come to like Obamacare after having been yoked with it a sufficient time.

I wrote in Ethics, Religion, and the Führer Principle:

Our present-day liberal-socialist welfare state embodies irreconcilable contradictions.  Liberals proclaim their faith in “every vote must count” democracy, yet endeavor to impose, often harshly, their arbitrary rules of social conduct on a restive and rebellious nation.  When the majority of the people will not support a legislative initiative, liberal-socialist Federal courts impose it by fiat, and liberal-socialists in the Senate make it their business to prevent the naming of judges who won’t go along with the game.

Socialism’s goal of equal property distribution necessitates confiscating property from people who are above average income and property ownership.  Liberals’ goal of destroying all vestiges of personal morality and giving unrestrained license to hedonism necessitates continually discovering hitherto unknown constitutional “rights.”

Mobilizing the voters for this requires a strong, charismatic Führer, a spell-binding orator like Adolph Hitler or Franklin Roosevelt who can make clearly unconstitutional action sound like motherhood and apple pie.

Liberal-progressives clearly believed they had found their new Führer in Barack Obama, who was to continue where FDR’s New Deal and LBJ’s Great Society had left off with imposition of full-blown socialistic materialism.

A particularly horrific example of liberal-progressive materialism and its presumption that biological materialism trumps morality is the Darwinian eugenics movement of the 19th and 20th centuries.  Darwinians of that era expressly denied morality, instead viewing political and social life as a struggle for survival of the fittest.

Read American Eugenics on the Eve of Nazi Expansion: The Darwin Connection See also Eugenics: Darwin Prescribed; Hitler Implemented and Darwinian Evolution: the Foundation of Liberal-Socialism.

Eugenicists, and today’s supporters of unrestrained abortion, believe collectivist tyranny to reshape the human population is inherent in liberal-progressive materialism.  Obama and his supporters believe, overtly or implicitly, that the socialistic welfare state is so evidently a necessity to social harmony and progress that imposing it by legislative force and judicial fiat is justified.

America’s Enduring Ideal

Jeffrey Sachs is only the latest in a long line of thinkers to reject the values of our commercial republic

By PAUL RYAN
Free enterprise has never lacked for moral critics. In the mid-18th century, for instance, the French philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau rejected the proposition that the free exchange of goods and services, and the competitive pursuit of self-interest by economic actors, result in general prosperity—ideas then emanating from Great Britain. In a commercial society, according to Rousseau, the people are “scheming, violent, greedy, ambitious, servile, and knavish . . . and all of it at one extreme or the other of misery and opulence.” Only a people with “simple customs [and] wholesome tastes” can be virtuous.

The Price of Civilization
By Jeffrey Sachs 
Random House, 324 pages, $27

In “The Price of Civilization,” Jeffrey Sachs carries Rousseau’s argument into the 21st century. Mr. Sachs, a development economist at Columbia University, believes that “at the root of America’s economic crisis lies a moral crisis: the decline of civic virtue among America’s political and economic elite.” The book’s veneer of economic analysis cannot conceal what is essentially a crusade against the free enterprise ethic of our republic.

Only through a reshaping of our principles and a reordering of the American economy, Mr. Sachs believes, can we become “a mindful society.” We must abandon a culture that is defined by hard work and the striving for upward mobility and an economy that has unleashed unparalleled prosperity. Hard work impedes leisure. Ambition is a vice. Economic growth hurts the planet.

The corporation is the antagonist in this morality play. Mr. Sachs refers early and often to widespread “suffering from the decline in corporate tax rates” and properly identifies a pernicious trend that both political parties have fallen victim to over the years: crony capitalism. But it is not just the rapaciousness of corporate interests that disturbs the author. He sees a deeper conspiracy at play. The marketing industry is referred to as the “dark arts of manipulation,” and television has been dangerously left “almost entirely to the private sector.” Our commitment to limited government and free enterprise has allowed “market values [to] trump social values.” We are scolded time and again for letting business interests encourage our faults and fallibilities.

“Through clearer thinking,” Mr. Sachs writes, “we can become more effective both as individuals, and as citizens, reclaiming power from corporations.” This reclamation will come primarily from punitive tax and regulatory measures. Mr. Sachs is undaunted by any thought that such a regime might worsen unemployment. The trained economist assures us: “Economic theory indeed supports the view that high tax rates can actually spur, rather than hinder, work effort.” He argues that financial incentives ought not to matter in a mindful society and is confident that well-intentioned social engineers can suspend the laws of economics.

One need not look far to find the inspiration for the America that Mr. Sachs seeks. He is explicit about his ideal, and it is Europe. America should match the high tax and “active labor market policies” found in the German and Scandinavian economies. The Constitution imposes too many restrictions on government interference for Mr. Sachs, and we’d be better served if we moved toward a “French-style” constitution that consolidated the executive and legislative branches and empowered experts to help us manage the “complexity of our economy.” On the most effective means of petitioning one’s government, Mr. Sachs sounds eerily Greek (A.D. 2011, not 500 B.C.): “A new political party can be combined with other forms of political agitation—consumer boycotts, protests, media campaigns, and social networking efforts—to put the most egregious leaders of the corporatocracy on notice.”

Advocating for the European model seems particularly ill-advised at the moment, given the current state of affairs across the Atlantic. Yet Mr. Sachs is untroubled by the contradictions between the Europe of his imagination and the crisis-ridden continent as it exists today. He writes: “The countries that failed to raise taxes adequately—such as Greece—are now paying the price in a massive fiscal crisis, as in the United States.” Too many industrialized countries, in his view, have fallen victim to the “race to the bottom” mentality of lowering corporate tax rates and depriving their governments’ coffers of the money needed to pay their mounting bills.

The “price” of civilization, we find out, is quite steep.

A “civilized” society will cost Americans roughly $12 trillion in higher taxes over the next decade. Mr. Sachs concedes that he could lower the bill if the economy were to grow fast enough to stabilize the debt, at which point a roughly $8 trillion tax hike would suffice. The proposed means by which the federal government can expand as the economy shrinks: raise corporate tax rates (and plead with our global competitors to stop reducing their business taxes); raise the top individual income tax rate; raise taxes on investment, energy, bank balance sheets and financial transactions; and impose a national sales tax.

Mr. Sachs is honest enough to acknowledge that the “rich” are not nearly rich enough to pay for his ever-expansive vision of government. We’re told that “each of us with an above-average income” (i.e., $50,000 per household) must “understand that if we are prudent, we can make do with a little less take-home pay.”

Such appeals to the citizenry to make sacrifices might be more compelling if Mr. Sachs coupled them with calls for spending restraint in Washington. Instead, his budget proposal insists on the need to “augment” government spending by trillions of dollars in the years ahead. Thus the sacrifices of citizens are to be made to increase the size and scope of a federal government that Mr. Sachs admits has demonstrated little aptitude for allocating resources efficiently or even fairly. This conundrum leads him to a conclusion that would be comical if he were not deadly serious: “Yes, the federal government is incompetent and corrupt—but we need more, not less, of it.”

Yet at its core “The Price of Civilization” is not about taxes or economics. It is about the “pursuit of happiness” as one academic understands it.

Enshrined in the country’s founding documents, “the pursuit of happiness” has long been recognized in America as a natural right to be secured by good government. As the Founders understood it, “happiness” referred to human fulfillment, to a well-lived life of virtue in this world and ultimate fulfillment in the next. In ensuring that its citizens are free to seek their happiness, government was to promote neither hedonism nor materialism. It was to secure the right to pursue happiness by not interfering with either normal commercial transactions or freedom of worship.

In “The Price of Civilization,” Mr. Sachs is asking the right questions. What is a life well lived? What should our government’s role be in building a more virtuous society? What policies should it pursue to promote fulfilling lives for its citizens? If such questions direct us to the moral wisdom of our cultural traditions, they can indeed help to balance the excesses of capitalism and so help us to extend its benefits to all.

Yet Mr. Sachs’s gospel of happiness draws not on the inspired tradition of the Founders but rather on the Utilitarian philosophy of Jeremy Bentham. In the 1780s, Bentham proposed that “happiness,” which he equated with “pleasure,” could be mathematically measured. It was not sufficient, he thought, for government to protect our rights if it was to vouchsafe our pursuit of happiness. Government must instead quantify “the greatest happiness of the greatest number” and set policies and goals accordingly. There was a science to satisfaction, Bentham claimed, and it was a puzzle that trained experts could solve.

Channeling Bentham, Mr. Sachs calls for the establishment of a national metrics for life satisfaction and sets a 10-year goal to “raise America’s happiness.” Although the specific measures are hazy, the steps are clear: For people to be happy, their government must increasingly shield them from the challenges of life. The good life is thus defined as one of ever-more pleasure at the expense of work.

But happiness in this world results not from avoiding challenges but from meeting them. Happiness is the recompense of real effort, whether intellectual or physical, and of earned success. It comes from achievement—from doing something of economic, artistic or emotional value. The satisfaction to be taken in producing valuable things brings with it a lasting sense of personal fulfillment. Mr. Sachs’s design for paternalistic government will only impede the pursuit of happiness.

Mr. Sachs is more accurate when he argues that economics is not merely about making money. It must serve the higher cause of human well-being and moral development. He is right to dislike the greed and vulgarity that can accompany bourgeois life. But he is wrong to attribute these phenomena to capitalism uniquely. Discord and imperfection arise from human nature. The question is how they can be contained and redirected. Capitalism, together with our moral traditions, has long offered a solution consistent with individual freedom. Mr. Sachs’s approach does not.

Mr. Sachs likely overstates Americans’ enthusiasm for restrictions on work, for the denial of constitutionally protected freedoms or for government controls over media and technology. His conception of the good life could perhaps be mutually agreed to in a small, isolated and homogeneous society. But here in the United States it would have to be imposed on a diverse and globally integrated nation of more than 300 million people. That is neither possible nor desirable.

The freedom and independence of the American population can best be guaranteed by allowing the people to govern themselves through their elected representatives; by keeping limits on the size of government; and by encouraging each of us to take responsibility for our own well-being. We can best be aided by our families, communities, churches and local institutions—and by the government only as a last resort.

For, ultimately, Mr. Sachs’s quarrel is with our founding principles of equality and liberty. Underlying the arguments in “The Price of Civilization” is a contention that the Constitution is too conducive to freedom, that it endorses an economic system too friendly to growth and the satisfaction of appetite, that it creates political institutions too inattentive to our national character.

In his first inaugural address, Thomas Jefferson defined “a wise and frugal Government, which shall restrain men from injuring one another, shall leave them otherwise free to regulate their own pursuits of industry and improvement, and shall not take from the mouth of labor the bread it has earned.” The contrast with Mr. Sachs’s idea of “good government” could not be more stark.

The Founders thought of America as exceptional, but Mr. Sachs thinks that this claim is a myth and that the country’s present greatness a historical aberration. Our decline is, thankfully, inevitable, he says: “America will not again dominate the world economy or geopolitics as it did in the immediate aftermath of World War II. That was a special historical moment; we can be glad that economic progress throughout the world is rapidly creating a more balanced global economy and society.”

It is through this prism of decline that we may better understand Mr. Sachs’s calls for an overbearing government to take more earnings from you and make more decisions for you, as well as his instructions for hard-working Americans to restrain their ambitions and accept their current place in life. He seeks nothing less than to replace the vision of the Founders—the ideals of individual liberty that have enabled America to achieve the unrivaled social, material and spiritual flourishing of the past two and a quarter centuries—with one that relies almost solely on the wisdom and beneficence of an intrusive, unlimited government.

The dialogue between capitalism and its critics is an old one, and it will continue. But as citizens of a self-governing nation, Americans must choose from time to time between alternative visions for our future. This book’s budget proposals and economic policies are profoundly revealing. They lay bare the real agenda of those who wish us to abandon the American idea and consign our nation to the irrevocable path of decline. If only in that sense, “The Price of Civilization” is a useful contribution to the conversation we must have in order to make informed political choices in the years ahead.

—Mr. Ryan represents Wisconsin’s First Congressional District and is chairman of the House Budget Committee.

Advocating ratification of the Constitution in 1787-89, James Madison and Alexander Hamilton wrote in the Federalist Papers that democracies are historically the least stable of all forms of government.  Once a majority succumbs to greed unleashed by awareness that they have the power to confiscate other people’s property for their own benefit, the way is open for demagogues like Franklin Roosevelt to rise to power as “friends of the people.”

Such tyrants will be supported by the liberal-progressive elite, who fancy that they are uniquely endowed with the intelligence to restructure society and its government in ways that will perfect them.  Those liberal-progressive elites, from 1917 until the 1960s vocally supported the so-called scientific socialism of Lenin and Stalin, even defending the Soviet Union’s slaughter of tens of millions of its citizens in the name of socialistic perfection, a form of government that was supposed to bring democratic equality to everyone.

This liberal-progressive infatuation with radical democracy dates to the French Revolution, which burst upon the world in 1789, the same year as the ratification of our Constitution.  At the end of the 19th century, Ivy League social scientists began to inculcate the false idea that our 1776 War of Independence had really been the same sort of radical mob uprising as the French Revolution, that it was aimed at imposing democracy upon the thirteen colonies.

Read Patrick Buchanan’s essay regarding today’s mindless support of anything that is labeled democracy.

Reader Richard Symonds, responding to Obama Bombs In State-Planned Industrial Policy, commented that my understanding of socialism is confused.

Mr. Symonds:

As Noam Chomsky has pointed out, “the term socialist has been so evacuated of content over the last century that it’s hard even to use in any sensible way...”

My response:

Professor Chomsky is wrong that the term socialism has been “evacuated of content” over the last century Rather, there have been many different definitions of socialism for at least 2,350 years, from Plato’s utopian communal state to the hard-nosed socialism expressed by Marx, Lenin, and Stalin. 

Another definition was advanced by Bertrand Russell, one of the world’s most prominent spokesmen for socialism, who said of it:

“For Social Democracy is not a mere political party, nor even a mere economic theory; it is a complete self-contained philosophy of the world and of human development; it is, in a word, a religion and an ethic.  To judge the work of Marx, or the aims and beliefs of his followers, from a narrow economic standpoint, is to overlook the whole body and spirit of their greatness.” (from Lecture One, German Social Democracy).

In arguably the best compendium of socialistic schemata, The Socialist Tradition, Professor Alexander Gray writes, “What, it may at the outset reasonably be asked, are we to understand by socialism?  The definitions of socialism that strew the expositions and the criticisms of socialism furnish a depressing prospect.  Some are foolish; some are vacuous; some are contradictory; some, which appear commendable up to a point, leave gaping omissions.”

I suggest that Mr. Symonds’s definition leaves gaping omissions, on which I will comment below.

Mr. Symonds:

But the Soviet Union was about as remote from socialism as you can imagine. The core notion of traditional socialism is that working people have to be in control of production and communities have to be in control of their own lives. The Soviet Union was the exact opposite of local control, the working people were virtual slaves. Chomsky suggests the collapse of the Soviet Union was in fact a great victory for socialism…

There are attempts today to describe a detailed vision of a socialist future and some of the most extensive and detailed are examples like Participatory Economics, and the moves toward an extension of democracy to the industrial sphere through worker-owned co-operatives.

My response:

Mr. Symonds’s definition of socialism implicitly assumes that local “communities” and a reified abstraction called “working people” spontaneously and harmoniously come together within a socialistic political state to order their economic and political daily life.  Nowhere in history has this phenomenon ever been observed in a society beyond the tribal level.  Even relatively homogeneous and low-population socialistic states like Norway and Sweden have had continuing political strife.

Worker-owned co-operatives function where privately-owned businesses agree to work together within a limited economic and geographic sphere.  Applying that model to the whole of a large, varied, and capital-intensive industrial society is a very remote possibility.

Socialism is, and must always be, imposed top-down upon a political state.  Plato envisioned a planned society administered by philosopher kings schooled from birth in morality, but it was necessary that an outside agent, in this case Plato himself, form a plan to which citizens theoretically would happily agree. 

In real life, people who own property do not willingly hand it over to central planners for “the good of society” as defined by a socialistic elite.  “Working people” and “communities” cannot gain control of production without forcibly confiscating private property or by legislatively or judicially cramming something like Obamacare down the throats of a strongly opposed citizenry.  Every variety of socialism, no matter how benevolent its proclaimed intentions, inescapably tends toward collectivized tyranny.

Hitler, by the way, in a 1927 speech said, “We are socialists, we are enemies of today’s capitalistic economic system for the exploitation of the economically weak, with its unfair salaries, with its unseemly evaluation of a human being according to wealth and property instead of responsibility and performance, and we are all determined to destroy this system under all conditions.” (a quote from John Toland’s 1976 “Adolf Hitler”).

Marx saw violent revolution as the necessary means to implement socialism.  Lenin is supposed to have said that socialism emanates from the barrel of a rifle.  Even the bloodless gradualism of British Fabianism required gaining the reins of power in Parliament and Whitehall in order to apply the full weight of the state to compel adherence to socialistic policies.  For British society as a whole, there was nothing voluntary about it.

Mr. Symonds:


Philosopher and educationalist John Dewey’s main work concentrated on democracy and he pointed out that as long as we have industrial feudalism — that is, private power controlling production and commerce — our democracy will be very limited. We have to move to what he called industrial democracy if we hope to have democracy of any significance.

My response:

The Soviet Union (which Mr. Symonds comments “was about as remote from socialism as you can imagine...") was Professor Dewey’s model of industrial democracy.  He and his colleagues who journeyed to the Soviet Union were enthralled with its economic planning and its educational system, which they promoted in Columbia University’s school of education as the means to inculcate Dewey’s hypothetical industrial democracy in the minds of callow students.

Mr. Symonds:


The way for individuals to realise the democracy “in their own hearts” was through community. As Dewey wrote, “it is through association that man has acquired his individuality and it is through association that he exercises it. The theory which sets the individual over against society, of necessity contradicts itself.”

My response:

Acquiring individuality “through community” reminds one of the 1960s and 1970s hippies who sought individuality by all sporting long, greasy hair and smelly, unwashed bodies, and indulging in addictive drugs. 

Individuality has little to do with membership in a community, other than the Judeo-Christian commandment for each individual to do the right thing in dealing with others.

Mr. Symonds:


Dewey believed that direct participation in a democracy would foster an unexpected talent for thoughtful deliberation in ordinary citizens.


“We lie in the lap of an immense intelligence,” he said. The difficulty was to unleash this intelligence, which remained dormant until “it possesses the local community as its medium”. In The Public and its Problems — Dewey’s only work of formal political philosophy — he outlined an elaborate programme of truly participatory democracy, one built around face-to-face interactions in “neighbourly communities”.

My response:

Dewey’s “unleashing this intelligence” reflects the standard liberal-progressive-socialist belief that individuals are incapable of recognizing their own best interests.  Socialists must “possess the local community” in order to inform the ignorant masses of what to do, how to do it, and when to do it.

Mr. Symonds:


Socialism is the idea that people should be in control of their own destiny and lives, including the institutions within which they work and the communities within which they live. This is the potential and my vision for local government.

My response:

The idea that, under socialism, people can be in control of their own destiny and lives is belied by universal experience.  For example, under socialized medicine, here and abroad, people’s access to medical care is severely circumscribed.  In the UK, people have no voice in government decisions that are hugely increasing their electricity and other energy costs.  President Bill Clinton, when asked why not cut people’s taxes, notoriously said that he opposed doing so, because people would spend the money on the wrong things.

Under socialism’s taxation and regulatory schemes, people’s work product and income are considered to be socialized state property.  The Marxian formulation was “from each according to ability, to each according to need.”

All varieties of socialism have common elements, among which are:

- A top-down approach in which a collective body - the political state or subdivision thereof - promulgates rules and regulations designed, to one degree or another, to circumscribe individuality and to impose uniform obedience.

- Belief that only a liberal-progressive-socialist elite has the intelligence and knowledge to promulgate those rules and regulations.

- Rejection of God and spiritual religion as unscientific ignorance.

- Belief in philosophical materialism, i.e., the ideology that recognizes only material conditions and material things as the determining agents of human behavior.

For more details, see Once Again: What Is Socialism?

Read Obama, Hitler, And Exploding The Biggest Lie In History on the Forbes website.

See also Hitler Was a 1930s Liberal-Socialist.

As I wrote in What Is Liberalism?

Despite what is commonly taught in our schools, liberalism, Fascism, Nazism, and Communism all are based on the religious doctrine of socialism.  They share a common belief that individualism and private property are the source of humanity’s ills.  All employ the same methodology of collectivized government control, differing only in degree.  All are materialistic and opposed to spiritual religion, believing that the state’s organization and its control of economic activity are the only real determinants of human behavior.  God as Creator of the universe is pushed aside, and His place is seized by the intellectual regulator.  The world and human society are henceforth to be whatever the intellectual decides that they should be.

The popular myth that Fascism, Nazism, and Communism are distinct and different from socialism was fabricated by apologists for socialism like Hannah Arendt, the author of “The Origins of Totalitarianism.” Before coming to New York at the outbreak of World War II, Arendt was a German philosopher who had been a collaborator of Martin Heidegger, the notorious philosophical supporter of Hitler’s National Socialist regime and a member of the Nazi party until it was disbanded in 1945.  In New York City she became a professor of political theory at The New School for Social Research, an institution founded in 1919 by John Dewey and other socialists to radicalize American students…

Not surprisingly, Hannah Arendt’s piece of propaganda is standard reading in our liberal-controlled colleges and universities.  She rationalizes that totalitarianism was a one-time phenomenon in Germany and the Soviet Union that depended upon a special set of circumstances unrelated to socialism as such.  Therefore, she contends, socialism remains the path to earthly perfection. To accept this as truth, of course, we must ignore China, Cuba, Nicaragua, Cambodia, North Korea, and the many African nations, all ruled by totalitarian, socialist despots.

What does, in fact, set Nazism and Fascism apart from American liberal-socialism and Communism is their emphasis on the historical cultural traditions of the National State.  Hitler made much of the Teutonic ancestry of German traditions, and Mussolini identified Fascism with the grandeur of the Roman Empire. 

Additionally, Fascists and Nazis did not nationalize private industrial companies to the same degree as Soviet Communists.  Bringing private enterprise under direct regulatory control of the National State was deemed sufficient.  Both Hitler’s Nazi regime and President Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal were established in 1933, and both followed the pattern set by Mussolini’s Fascist State Corporatism in the 1920s.

Hitler and Mussolini were first and foremost patriots who aimed to build up and to glorify Germany and Italy.  After many years in senior leadership positions within the Italian Socialist party, Mussolini split off during World War I, because the socialists called upon their members not to fight for Italy, but to give their allegiance entirely to the Socialist Internationale.  After the end of World War I, he organized the Fascist party to impose the order and control required for a nationalistic, socialistic regime. 

Hitler’s attitude was essentially the same.  After Germany’s defeat in World War I, he always spoke of the “stab in the back,” that is, an imagined betrayal of Germany by the bankers, industrialists, and the Jews.  Hitler shrewdly projected his National Socialist party as the middle ground between the old Prussian aristocracy and the dissolute hedonism of the communist-oriented Weimar Republic.  To the German people, battered by war reparations, catastrophic inflation, and the Depression, he preached resurrection of national power under himself as leader and intellectual planner. 

Hitler’s opposition to the Weimar Republic, so highly regarded by American liberal-socialists, led to the fiction that Nazism was a right-wing movement, completely different from socialism.  That amounts to declaring arbitrarily that left-handed fighters are boxers, but right-handed fighters are criminal assailants.  Both are doing the same thing, just using different labels.

Nazi, by the way, is simply the short name for Hitler’s National Socialist German Workers Party.  The party slogan was “ The Common Good Outranks Private Profit,” and the aims proclaimed for the German political state were exactly those promised by Franklin Roosevelt in his first inaugural address of April 1933. 

In a 1927 speech, Hitler said, “We are socialists, we are enemies of today’s capitalistic economic system for the exploitation of the economically weak, with its unfair salaries, with its unseemly evaluation of a human being according to wealth and property instead of responsibility and performance, and we are all determined to destroy this system under all conditions.”

That declaration could easily have come from Barack Obama’s lips.

The Scottish Enlightenment and America’s Founding
In 1776
By Robert Curry

In 1776, [Adam] Smith could only theorize from scattered historical precedents as to how a projective free enterprise system might work, because nowhere in his mercantilist world was a free enterprise system of the sort he described on paper actually operating.

The American states of 1776 in gambling on democratic republics stood alone in the political world.  Nowhere in contemporary Europe or Asia could Americans turn for reassuring precedents showing functioning republican government.

Douglass Adair

Though they were boldly proposing to take mankind where it had never gone before, neither Smith nor the Founders were utopian dreamers.  We now know that their thinking was quite sound.  Free markets work, and today even tyrants accept the need to stage elections and plebiscites to give their regimes at least the appearance of legitimacy.  The systems of Smith and the Founders showered the world with undreamed of prosperity and liberty, at least for those of us fortunate enough to live where their ideas were applied.

Smith and the Founders believed they had arrived at an understanding of human action much as Newton had explained celestial motion.  Washington said it best.  The Founding, he wrote in 1783, had occurred at a time “when the rights of mankind were better understood and more clearly defined, than at any former period; the researches of the human mind after social happiness, have been carried to a great extent, …[and] are laid open for our use.”

Just as Newton had explained celestial mechanics by means of the unifying principle of gravity, the thinkers of the Scottish Enlightenment had based their thinking on a single unifying principle.  The Americans of the Enlightenment era had embraced that same principle and set out to apply it carefully in their design of the American Republic.  Douglass Adair, perhaps the greatest 20th century student of the Founders, identified their unifying principle this way: 

The Scottish system, as it had been gradually elaborated in the works of a whole generation of researchers, rested on one basic assumption…The assumption was “that…in all nations and ages…human nature remains still the same, in its principles and operations.

Adair quotes Hume here and means for us to understand that with these words Hume could be acting as the spokesperson for the Scots of the Enlightenment era, as well as for the Founders. 

Within just a few years of 1776, the Founders were to make the next great application of what they had learned.  They made use of those researches to create two of the greatest breakthroughs of the Enlightenment-- first the Constitution and then the Federalist Papers.

Since their time, history has been marked by a succession of assaults on these researches by wave after wave of theoreticians, sometimes backed by political movements, sometimes backed by marching armies.  Those theoretical assaults have taken a toll on the luster of the systems of 1776.  Yet fettered as it is, the free market continues to prove itself, and the democratic republic of the Founders still endures.

The Founders believed that they were building on a solid foundation of real understanding.  What if they were correct in their assessment of what they had done?  Then perhaps that is why what they made has endured.  That would suggest that those who attack their work are simply recoiling from what actually works and how things actually are.  If so, perhaps President Coolidge said it best:

If all men are created equal, that is final.  If they are endowed with inalienable rights, that is final.  If governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed, that is final.  No advance, no progress can be made beyond these propositions. 

If anyone wishes to deny their truth or their soundness, the only direction in which he can proceed historically is not forward, but backward toward the time when there was no equality, no rights of the individual, no rule of the people.  Those who wish to proceed in that direction cannot lay claim to progress.  They are reactionary.  Their ideas are not more modern, but more ancient, than those of the Revolutionary fathers.

Two Visions of the Enlightenment
By Robert Curry

“Fontenelle [was] the most representative of all the figures of the Enlightenment…”
Isaiah Berlin

“If America was the embodiment and natural home of the Enlightenment,…then the American who best personified the Enlightenment ideal was Benjamin Franklin.”
Isaac Kramnick

Prof. Kramnick is the editor of The Portable Enlightenment Reader.  He selected a painting of Franklin for the cover of the book--Benjamin West’s Benjamin Franklin Drawing Electricity from the Sky.  If Prof. Berlin had selected the cover illustration, perhaps he would have chosen a painting of Fontonelle instead. 

In his brief discussion of the academician Bernard Le Bovier de Fontonelle, Prof. Berlin explains that he led a “very careful and rational life.” Fontonelle, he also tells us, wrote this: “A work of politics, of morality, of criticism, perhaps even of literature, will be finer, all things considered, if made by the hands of a geometer.” A geometer is, of course, a person skilled in geometry.

These two accomplished scholars seem to be presenting two very different visions of the Enlightenment.  According to one vision, the Enlightenment’s center of gravity was unquestionably in France and its ideal was skillfulness in abstract rationality.

Franklin personified a very different vision of the Enlightenment.  Capturing the incredible range of Franklin’s gifts and the extent of his contributions is a challenge—and “abstract rationality” doesn’t even come close.  The story of the lightning experiment is a great place to begin to understand him. 

Franklin did more than just explain lightning, more even than lay the foundation for our modern understanding of electricity and the very technology you are using at this moment to read these words.  He went on to make an urgently-needed practical application of his new-found scientific understanding by developing the world-changing technology of the lightning rod.  Then he published the technological know-how, sharing it freely with the world.  He demonstrated that we could understand nature and that our understanding of nature could change the world for the better for everyone.  If a church happened to be struck by lightning and burned, it meant that the church fathers had neglected to install a lightning rod, not that that week’s sermon had perhaps found disfavor with God.  Here Franklin the scientist and technological innovator meets up with Franklin the philanthropist who instigated, organized and supported financially and otherwise so many projects to improve the life of his fellow Philadelphians. 

Of course, Franklin the statesman played an important role in shaping both the Declaration and the Constitution, two of the most world-changing achievements of the American Enlightenment, and of the Enlightenment overall.  Characteristically, in the course of his many trips back and forth across the Atlantic in the political service of the colonies and the new nation, he also seized the opportunity to discover and map (modern satellites confirm quite accurately) the Gulf Stream, improving trans-Atlantic travel by ship forever.  Franklin, the man who has been called “the First American,” genuinely seemed to welcome every opportunity in his life-long adventure of making a better world.

These two representative figures make it crystal clear that there is a world of difference between the French Enlightenment, as represented by Fontonelle, and the American Enlightenment, as represented by Franklin.  Consequently, when someone makes a general statement characterizing the Enlightenment overall, it makes good sense for us to ask “which Enlightenment?”