Annals of an Abiding Liberal
Minogue, Kenneth
BOOKS IN REVIEW - "Annals of an Abiding Liberal" In 1925, John Maynard Keynes put to himself the question: Am I a liberal? Speaking to an audience of Cambridge liberals, Lord Keynes explained that, like all political...
...Economists the world over have given themselves up to this kind of regulation with vast enthusiasm...
...in physical chemistry at the University of California, Berkeley, in 1973 and joined the General Motors staff that year...
...But in the long run they destroy important self-sustaining elements of that system, and thus tend to breed problems even more intractable than those they originally solved...
...In addition to his research, Dr...
...Their work has valuable practical implications for the automotive field, where catalysis is used to remove harmful emissions from automobile exhaust...
...tn his most recent work, Dr...
...The atoms are bonded very strongly (200 k J/tool) to the surface...
...Fortunately, another technique was available to determine the bonding...
...Monetarists in economics, usually classified as rightwing, are in these terms aligned with environmentalists, who tend to be recruited from the left-wing...
...and hence the appropriate formula for a decent humility on these matters is Alexander Herzen's remark: "We are not the doctors, we are the disease...
...This message comes in two stages: first an analysis of modern society, and then a piece of advice about how we ought to respond to the analysis...
...He has a simple message which seems to be vastly popular, and the one thing that is certain is that it is entirely useless...
...Liberal economists must believe that they are of the chosen--that, as I've said often, God is a Keynesian Democrat...
...Talking of the multinational corporations which, somewhat eccentrically for a liberal, Galbraith tends to defend, he remarks that "They do not simply accept the instruction of the market...
...The only serious action, in Galbraith's world, is the action of bureaucrats and experts, and the only serious kind of action is not that of ordinary human beings, but the manipulative devices of governments...
...ANNALS OF AN ABIDING LIBERAL John Kenneth Galbraith / Houghton Mifflin $12.95 Kenneth Minogue responded to nothing but the market, and the Charybdis of a bureaucratic socialism~ which destroyed individual freedom...
...Now we really do know just what happened, how it happened, and who was concerned in its happening...
...Now the disciplines of the market have been undermined by a political struggle between competing monopolies...
...And indeed it is true that a market economy, like such other systems as a human organism, is only partially self-regulating...
...On one side of him he was an aspiring ambassador, and well on the way to becoming one...
...What, indeed, is the alternative...
...On one side stand those who believe that the whole adventure has been a mistake, and that we ought to align ourselves once more with any self-regulating system available--the human organism, the environment, the economy...
...i General Motors Peop!e building transportation to serve people Galbraith is appropriately patronizing toward those who advocate this alternative...
...B O O K R E V I E W S I n 1925, John Maynard Keynes put to himself the question: Am I a liberal...
...I n terms of this understanding of the twentieth century, Galbraith can only appear as a Keynesian who hardly seems to understand what the controversy is about...
...On this question there is, of course, an abundance of evidence, because Galbraith is far from being the solitary crusader for such nostrmaas that he pretends to be...
...We do not have to be entirely in favor of systems, nor entirely against them...
...It will no doubt be "con- the market...
...Professor Galbraith has, like many others, discovered that the modern world differs from the economist's model of perfect competition...
...Those who enjoy the Galbraithian formula, which combines Olympian urbanity with undemanding comment on public events, will find here exactly what has pleased them before...
...That has excellent implications for protecting the environment...
...If someone like myself, with special reasons for being interested--I had worked under Philby in MI6, the wartime version of the secret service, or SIS, had been in some sort of contact with several of the other characters involved, and was generally familiar with the intelligence scene did not feel that another presentation was bearable, how could the book be expected to attract general readers ? When, however, The Fourth Man came into my hands, I found it compulsive reading...
...Mathematical analysis of the desorption processallows one to characterize the chemical bond between the oxygen and the platinum surface...
...It is, evidently, to remove government from the business of guaranteeing we need is a prices and incomes prosperity, and to allow ordinary policy...
...Burgess's heroes were Winston Churchill and Anthony Eden, who will scarcely have measured up, or down, to Stalin...
...None of these odd bedTHE AMERICAN SPECTATOR FEBRUARY 1980 27 fellows like each other very much...
...Governments can indeed be liberated--such is the Keynesian lesson--from such petty disciplines as balancing the budget and living within their means...
...As they say in the courts, the case is now closed, and as far as the relevant facts are concerned, I cannot see that it will ever need to be reopened...
...As a free-lance spy, he was most successful in Paris, where a fellow pederast, Edouard Pfeiffer, who happened to b e t h e then Prime Minister Daladier' s chef-de- Cabinet, provided him with useful information relating to French politics and politicians, which, suitably processed, could be fed to all his diverse clients...
...Instead they have extensive power over prices and also over consumer behavior...
...Half a century later, both the achievement and the man himself look much more ambiguous than they did in the decades after the war when fiscal fine-tuning seemed to have solved the problems posed by the trade cycle...
...Keynes was the Odysseus who showed Western societies how they could avoid both the Scylla of an apparently brutal capitalism, which Kenneth Minogue is the author of...
...Bein-g ~ extravagant, self-indulgent, and generous, he was also ever in need of money...
...The fact that he italicized the word "bourgeoisie" is one measure of how far we have come in half a century: Another such measure will be found in John Kenneth Galbraith's Annals of an Abiding Liberal, a miscellany of what Galbraith has been writing during the middle years of the seventies...
...use catalytic converters filled with beads containing platinum to chemically transform carbon monoxide and unburned hydrocarbons into harmless CO2 and water...
...Galbraith talks of this job as "contentious," but to judge by the experience of some countries, "murderous" would be a better adjective...
...Ownership has split off from control, and the clue to the dynamics of the modern world lies in attending to oligopolies so powerful that they can determine consumer behavior through advertising and legislation through lobbying...
...The fearfully knowing realism by which one is invited to see through the myths and errors of the "conventional wisdom" is very much Galbraith's stock in trade, and he marshals all these devices in an attempt to convince the reader that there is no self-correcting economic system, no discipline of the market, to go back to...
...They were too boneheaded for his taste...
...From an analysis of the desorption process, it was possible to establish the complete energetics...
...The GM scientists were most interested in learning how this adsorbed molecular species is bonded to the platinum surface...
...As a spy, he was as systematic and reliable as in carrying out his diplomatic ,duties...
...It is true that two other major participants in the PhilbyMaclean-Burgess affair remain hidden in the book behind their intelligence pseudonyms...
...How, the wondering reader may think, can full employment possibly be described as "ifiaction...
...This new ideolbgical divide is playing havoc with the traditional political and moral groupings...
...Gland comments: " I came to GM Labs because I wanted to get in on the ground floor of an exciting new field...
...Speaking to an audience of Cambridge liberals, Lord Keynes explained that, like all political animals, he needed a party to belong to...
...The mass spectrometer is used to measure the desorption of 02 as the platinum surface is heated...
...This was most exciting" said Dr...
...THE Dr John Gland, MAN 32 years old, is a Senior Research SciBEHIND e n t i s t in s u r f a c e THE chemistry at the WORK General Motors Research Laboratories...
...We are also' in a position to examine the consequences of well-intentioned interference with income levels--the rage, for example, induced among skilled workers by interference with their differentials...
...his Soviet spymaster appears to have been fairly lavish, but exigent...
...These relations are very complicated, since we cannot merely return to the same self-regulating economy of the last century, any more than the human organism can revert to what it was under the condition of earlier centuries...
...Typically, management defines a broad problem, then we're free to tackle the solution in any way we choose...
...Capitalism is no longer what it was, since the rapacious mill owner has given way to bland men in grey flannel suits...
...The interesting conclusion that results is that the formation of O atoms on platinum is a two-step process-oxygen is adsorbed in a molecular state and then dissociates to form atoms...
...Maclean is the most difficult of the three to fathom--or maybe there is nothing to fathom...
...Beneath the strained urbanity of the prose lies an apologia for bureaucracy...
...and perhaps, indeed, it is unnecessary that we should identify ourselves exclusively on this principle...
...Those are the kinds of questions that Dr...
...Much of this writing consists of taking a dim view of his professional colleagues: They are so comfort-loving as seldom to rise to the level of critical ideas Galbraith himself has achieved...
...Preliminary surface work has explored an interesting new phenomenon...
...In these experiments, the platinum surface is covered with oxygen at the extremely low temperature of -179~ (almost the temperature of liquid nitrogen) by exposing it to gaseous O~ ,molecules...
...on another side, a tiresome, quarrelsome drunk and pervert...
...He modestly excludes himself...
...The adsorbed oxygen molecule can either desorb into the gas phase (37 kJ/mol) or dissociate into atoms (33 kJ/mol...
...The technique is called electron energy-loss spectroscopy and is quite new-there are only six or seven such instruments in the world...
...The subsequent disclosure of the identity of Anthony Blunt has caused a great hullabaloo, but it in no way alters the essential pattern of events as conveyed by Boyle...
...The measurements not only confirmed the existence of the adsorbed molecular oxygen but showed that it was bound by the transfer of two electrons from the platinum surface into the antibonding fig orbitals of oxygen...
...And if the choice is between the irresponsible bureaucracies of the big corporations, on the one hand, and the democratically elected governments of modern states on the other, then we already have the outlines of an answer ready to hand...
...We are thus in a position to study the scarcities and distortions of supply created by schemes of price control The housing market in many countries is an excellent example...
...Consider first the analysis...
...A graduate of Whittenberg University in Ohio, Dr...
...The Liberal Mind...
...Oxygen molecules from the gas phase strike the surface and are weakly bound (37 kJ/mol...
...Only in the textbooks," he tells us in a typically misleading sentence, "is the consumer left to his or her sovereign decision...
...FOM the desorption analysis, it was also possible to deduce the mechanism for the dissociation process...
...John Gland and his colleagues at the General Motors Research Laboratories are investigating to get a better understanding of the chemistry behind catalysis...
...But slowly the cost is being realized...
...With several hundred people with Ph.D.s here, we've got a lot of human resources to draw on in all the basic sciences...
...Economics has turned into politics, by which Galbraith means the exercise of power, and the only remaining question is: Who shall be the master...
...The atmosphere here is very open, with lots of cross-pollination among departments...
...THE FOURTH MAN: THE DEFINITIVE ACCOUNT OF KIM PHILBY, GUY BURGESS, AND DONALD MACLEAN AND WHO RECRUITED THEM TO SPY FOR RUSSIA Andrew Boyle / The Dial Press / 111.95 Malcolm Muggeridge When Andrew Boyle told me that he was proposing to write yet another book on the Philby-Maclean-Burgess affair, it seemed to me like a crazy undertaking...
...and Galbraith is nothing if not a master of some of the more elementary devices of persuasion...
...The electron energy analyzer allows one to measure the concentration and character of the oxygen adsorbed on the platinum surface...
...Some inconveniences we must accept, on pain of destroying everything...
...On all of these difficult questions--both in economics and in the wider fields of human endeavor-we are only at the beginning of what must become a much more profound understanding of the relation between our choices and the world we inhabit...
...Antibiotics have become the image of this fundamental prOblem which has appeared in many areas of Western civilization...
...He can hardly criticize anything without referring to it in religious terms as liturgy, myth, orthodoxy, or faith, just as he can seldom commend an opinion without having recourse to the modish irony of describing it as deviant, eccentric, or heretical...
...Gland enjoys backpacking in Wyoming and in the Sierra Nevada Mountains in California...
...Still, there's nothing a self-regulating system...
...The same sort of thing has been done for the Hiss case in America by Allen Weinstein's book, Perjury...
...The conservationist finds himself more than etymologically identified with the conservative...
...This is why Galbraith so evidently exaggerates the power of big corporations, for they are manipulators, and what consumers do is, in Galbraith's eyes, not the real action of real people, but merely a reflex reaction to manipulation...
...t'l~veryone who gives political or economic advice is unavoidably part of the set of events he seeks to influence...
...He, too, was chronically extravagant, and liable to be impecunious, but he managed to tap a variety of sources...
...But before taking to flight, one or two observations are in order, and they may best take the form of contrasting Keynes and Galbraith as the beginning and end of a quite "distinct epoch in the public life of the Western world...
...Like the housemaid who was only " a little bit pregnant," the problem has grown and grown until we face unpleasant alternatives whichever way we go...
...At one point he was in receipt of salaries or retainers from SIS, the KGB, a Rothschild, and--most miraculous of all-Sir Joseph Ball, Neville Chamberlain's intelligence factotum...
...Besides, he added, if it is to be a class war we are fighting, it will find me "on the side of the educated bourgeoisie...
...In seeking answers to these questions, surface chemists study the elemental composition and geometric arrangement of atoms in the first few atomic layers of the surface and the means by which atoms and molecules from the gas phase bond to the surface...
...There are some t literary essays, a bizarre attack on the rich, and even Galbraith's ideas on the Seven Wonders of the World...
...it often fails...
...Malcolm Muggeridge is working on t~e third volume of /sis autobiography, Chronicles of Wasted Time...
...There remains the question--unanswerable, but inviting endless speculation and theorizing--of motivation, not by any means the same in each case Thus, Philby, I should say, as a great adulator of his father, St...
...This is important because oxygen is the agent that must be adsorbed on the surface to react with carbon monoxide and hydrocarbons to convert them to CO 2. The experiments were conducted in a stainless steel ultrahigh vacuum system equipped with an electron energy analyzer and a mass spectrometer...
...As a collector of intelligence, he was adroit, though an inveterate liar--which, in fact, they nearly all are...
...This option he also rejected, on the grounds that all socialist parties fundamentally live off the smell of some dreadful catastrophe they hope will sweep them into power...
...But if one can penetrate the thick rhetorical flak surrounding the argument, one is likely to be most struck by Galbraith's fascinating suggestion that a "full employment.equilibrium" is achieved by "inaction...
...What, he asked himself, about the Conservative Party...
...It is called iatrogenic medicine...
...In fact, of course, the extent of the power of these corporations is a hotly disputed subject...
...They make the human body much more convenient for each of us...
...The quintessential wisdom of public policy is thus revealed, and with it, the end of the road on which Keynes started us half a century ago: What that's really beyond the competence of an army of bureaucrats once their minds are made up...
...One thing is certain: Our trio of traitors could b y no stretch of the 30 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR FEBRUARY 1980...
...And on the other side are those yetconfident rationalists who urge us to develop some new super-antibiotic which will finally render the system responsive to our every desire...
...the full employment equilibrium is basic to the conservative creed, and inaction is the way to realize that equilibrium...
...Gland received his Ph.D...
...The oxygen remaining in the gas phase is pumped away, and then the desorp28 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR FEBRUARY 1980 and union, is the nub of Galbraith's realism, and his advice to economists is political advice: Unless they "proceed with the greatly contentious task of working out a system of income and price restraints over those who have gained some control of their prices and incomes--a task that must combine patient consultation with the use of the powers of the state--inflation will either be uncontrolled or, as now, partially controlled by unemployment...
...It seems to me clear that Galbraith is disposed to believe in the power of advertisers less because he has studied the matter very deeply than because at heart he thinks that most people are gullible fools...
...Gland, "because this is the first time that this type of oxygen bond has been observed on a metal surface...
...In terms of these wider issues, Galbraith's speculations look helplessly to the past rather than probingly into the...
...Surely, I thought, if ever a subject had been explored and expounded to the point of exhaustion, it was this one...
...Gland has been studying the adsorption and desorption of oxygen on platinum single-crystal surfaces...
...An important branch of this new study would examine the results of prices and incomes policies...
...We're getting closer and closer to a more specific understanding of catalysis," says Dr...
...the mechanism of oxygen dissociation over a wide range of temperatures...
...But this does not at all mean that the human body can be entirely subordinated to external determination according to whatever we may think convenient...
...But advertising, however silly much of it may be, is always directed to something that people may rationally want...
...Exogenous factors like diet and temperature determine whether, and how, the human body will prosper...
...T h a t the laws of supply and demand have been superseded by the power of monOpolies, both corporate The Atomic Arran_gement In a recent experiment, scientists at the General Motors Research Laboratories studied changes in chemical bonding during the dissociation of oxygen molecules on platinum...
...Referring to the opinion he is criticizing as a "theology" is a typical Galbraithian device...
...This new situation has in all areas produced a fundamental cleavage in modern opinion...
...And, as a contribution to the annihilation of sitting ducks, the volume contains an account of the file the FBI has apparently been keeping on Professor Galbraith for the last 40 years...
...twice a week, briefcase in hand, he went by train from Washington to New York, there to copy out in his neat handwriting atomic data for transmission to his KGB bosses...
...It is, in other words, a tentious" and there may have to be return (as much as this is possible) to "restraints...
...Even so...
...He t- ~.ads a group of 7 investigators, 4 wihi Ph.D.s, all involved in work relating to the' basic surface chemistry of catalysis...
...Now the rhetorical point of analysis, in this kind of writing, is to render the advice almost superfluous...
...The government will fix the people to respond to the signals o f figures...
...The more or less amonomous economy has become a political plaything...
...Most cars built in the U.S...
...The autonomy may, indeed, have been in part illusion, but it was, in some respects at least, a beneficent illusion...
...John Philby, the Arabist, was on the lookout for an equivalent hero to his father's, King Ibn Saud, and~ght he had found one in Stalin...
...and Herzen's remark reminds us that there is now a flourishing study concerned with the ills created by medicine itself...
...future...
...The idea of a self-regulating market has often been denounced as a capitaiist swindle...
...Or the Labour Party...
...Surely those fully employed people must be very active indeed...
...Four years after this traffic first began to show on intercepts, t h e decision was taken to pounce on him, thereby precipitating his departure to Moscow...
...But we ought at least to recognize that this distinction is fundamental to the modern debate...
...I have already used the ambiguities of antibiotics in curing the ills of the human organism as an image for any kind of interference with more or less self-regulating systems...
...If indeed they were Constantly persuading us to buy chocolatecovered dishcloths, or two-headed garden gnomes, or other idiocies, in large numbers, then this might be a plausible case...
...Such bureaucratic regulation is a slope, and at the bottom we i n - evitably find ourselves faced with a degree of coercion generally found unacceptable in liberal societies...
...Conservative economists," he tells us, " i f sufficiently archaic, have some justification for this theology...
...And if the reader pushes his thought one stage further, he will be struck by a solution which is consonant with the entire Galbraithian style of thought...
...The Keynesian adventure of the last haft-century has thus dissolved into a series of intractable economic problems for which the only solution seems to be an evasive kind of uplift...
...A plan of merely limited interference with the workings of the market has proved unstable...
...To what extent can they in fact determine prices ?i Above all, is it true that they can determine consumer behavior through advertising...
...Professor tion of oxygen from the surface is observed as the platinum crystal is gradually heated to 1000~ The oxygen was found to desorb from the s u r f a c e in two distinctly different temperature regimes-part at -125~ and the rest at about 425~ By using the oxygen-18 isotope, it was established that the low temperature desorption represents oxygen that was adsorbed on the surface in a molecular form while the higher temperature desorption corresponds to oxygen adsorbed in the atomic form...
...U~DER what conditions will oxygen molecules dissociate into single atoms on a platinum surface...
...Those who, like myself, find the wit mechanical and the persona odiously supercilious would be well advised to run a mile...
...Patient research and investigation, skillful questioning, good sense, and some lucky encounters have enabled Boyle at last to fit together all the pieces of the jigsaw puzzle convincingly...
...They give us the freedom, equipment and support to get the job done correctly...
...What is the mechanism for oxygen dissociation...
...The most recent case is Great Britain...
...Gland...
...While it has long been known that catalysts arean effective way to convert these gases, little is known about precisely why and in what order the basic atomic reactions Occur...
...By analogy, we now need a parallel pathology in economics--econogenic studies--concerned THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR FEBRUARY 1980 29 with the malfunctions of economic life caused by the advice of economists themselves...
...The more we learn about simple chemical systems, the better we'll be able to control more complicated systems...
...The advice Galbraith offers with vast self-confidence is for government to take over the system, a remedy already tried in many countries and usually abandoned in disorder...
...I see him as essentially a sort of Etonian mudlark: mischievous, disgusting, but with no serious ideological preoccupations...
...They rival, where they do not borrow from, the power of the state...
...They produce great benefits by destroying many unpleasant, even fatal, causes of disequilibrium...
Vol. 13 • February 1980 • No. 2
