Reflections on The Road to Serfdom
Buckley, William F. Jr.
William F. Buckley, Jr. Reflections on "The Road to Serfdom" • (Mr: Buckley's essay has been adapted from a paper he presented at a Special Meeting of the Mont Pelerin Society held at...
...We are seve times, disadvantaged in the struggle...
...In fact, he goes further, as we s see...
...But, he added, there is "another alliance: The alliance between our Communist leaders and your capitalists...
...Over a period of time, that kind of movement must lead us down the road to serfdom, into that amnestic void toward which, Orwell intuited, evil men were for evil purposes expressly bent on taking us...
...today, morrow, and always—one cannot fmd all of Moscow an orthodox Marxist...
...But so great as to induce him to deliberate respectfully the relativist obsessions of other thinkers, which I however view as lime spread over Hayek's life's work...
...1. The freedom to deceive is overindulged...
...Irvi Kristol has said that the stunni paradox is that the intellectual fil against socialism is triumphant even the forces of socialism triumph: and t this they manage to do by arguing tl socialism isn't really about economic ficiency and, correlatively, by disdain...
...But he cannot shrug off the credit for having brought much of it all together: the integrated perception of the relation between law, and justice, and liberty...
...I speak of a class of self-conscious men, atrophied by two generations of contempt by academicians and moralists, which reacts by exhibiting a libertine indifference to the quality or direction of political-economic instruction in 'the colleges they patronize...
...The Alternative: An American Spectator March 1976 13...
...1 another, "it s -ems to be true," as Ha^ wistfully put it in his essay on the s ject, "that it is on the whole the more tive, intelligent and original men arm the intellectuals who most frequently cline toward socialism, while its op nents are often of an inferior calibe And, finally, though the other side is creasingly evasive on the point, you spot, slouching about in the gran statements of socialist purpose, inf tions of an eschatological charac which, in the nature of things, traditic liberalism lacks, quite properly so...
...Such presumption reveals only the narrowness of an outlook uninformed by humility...
...Hayek has always taken scrupulous care to give credit, if it is faintly plausible to do so, to others who articulated ideas before he did, and indeed sometimes, on reading the footnotes to his Constitution of Liberty, one almost has the feeling that the book is a collection of after-dinner toasts by Hayek -to great philosophers, political thinkers, and economists, from Thales to Ludwig von Mises...
...Poor Miss Rand sought to give him a massive dose of estrogen, to make him virile and irresistible, leader of a triumphant meritocratic revolt against asphyxiative government...
...The counterattack was vigorous, in some cases highly personal and vindictive, in other instances grand and supercilious...
...My final proposition is this: The opposition to socialism must remain primarily negative, and takes strength from being so...
...standingsthat that is an incomplete, in...
...the identification of liberty with some other principle, such as equality] only when the definitions of liberty and of equality have been so juggled that both refer to approximately the same condition of activity...
...I shall not soon forget the scene, symbolic of the triumphs of demagogic terror over productive enterprise: Senator Scoop Jackson, sitting high in his committee chair, addressing the 12 top officials of the oil and gas industry, meekly astride their stools at the bar of justice, publicly chastising them on their obscene profits...
...I hope to be understood as saying something more interesting than that greed is the root of many evils, a bipartisan conclusion about human nature...
...Intellectual adventure is nowadays best defined as treating respectfully that which was accepted as a truism only a few generations ago...
...Hayek is so cautious a craftsman as to cause even someone intoxicated by his summons to intellectual adventure to wonder whether his summons to Utopia might have been the mischievous working of atmospheric gravity on his numinous pen...
...I was recently with him in Switzerland attempting, at lunch, to find a common blank in our calendars, in order to schedule a network exchange in New York for which we had contracted...
...I advance three propositions...
...freedom insofar as it attaches in any v to property or commerce...
...For one thing, it isn't going to happen...
...Now that the Nobel Prize Committee has taken pains to honor Professor Hayek's technical contributions to economic science, alongside Gunnar Myrdal's contributions to something or other, one is reminded of a sentence from Hayek's "The Intellectuals and Socialism": "It is especially significant for our problem that every scholar can probably name several instances from his field of men who have undeservedly achieved a popular reputation as great scientists solely because they hold what the intellectuals regard as progressive' political views...
...Reflections on "The Road to Serfdom" • (Mr: Buckley's essay has been adapted from a paper he presented at a Special Meeting of the Mont Pelerin Society held at Hillsdale College, Michigan, in August 1975, to celebrate the work of Friedrich Hayek...
...T forms of socialism are quite sufficient do the deadly work...
...I fear that in this matter he is uniquely correct...
...His contribution to the Ever Normal Granary, 12 The Alternative...
...Rather, Hayek explained, it is lost gradually...
...The perspectives of Hayek are Away: So long as Mr...
...It has been re-narked that Professor Hayek's public nanners are exemplary...
...Solzhenitsyn cannot be expected to be familiar with the nuances by which a successfully ordered free market economy administrates, and finally puts a limit on, the uses of greed...
...It is a tribute to him, and to his small book, that we should be able to say this...
...What we do not need is anything that suggests that human freedom is going to lead us to Utopia...
...Galbraith has never wavered on one inclination, and that is his contempt for American capitalists—I speak, here and below, of the class, not of individuals...
...and it is lost by assigning vague, extra-lawful mandates to men of political authority who take on tasks which they cannot be expected to perform without absorbing all the knowledge, values, preferences, and passions of all their fellow men...
...But we would not have achieved Utopia...
...To hear such thoughts uttered by businessmen at conventions of the National Association of Manufacturers, and quoted in the Reader's Digest, was one thing...
...but soon it transpired, even as Russell Kirk predicted, that her novels were being read not because of their jackbooted individualism, but because of the fornicating bits...
...Professor Hayek, in the passage already quoted about the need for new liberal programs that appeal to the imagination, goes on...
...And self-respect requires that we stimulate the social and academic sanction against that which is misleading, let alone preposterous...
...which void Professor Oakeshott sees us headed towards under the impulse of our own indisposition to bear the heavy responsibilities of freedom...
...I shall return this afternoon to the :rvous center of the cultural world, -oaning under the weight of the greatest :nsity of intellectuals per acre this side Socrates' academy...
...The necessary result of that usurpation is the corresponding loss in the freedom of the body in which the authority previopsly reposed...
...I said...
...2. The inferiority of the class of intellectual defenders of capitalism is less critical a factor in contemporary circumstances than the moral inferiority of capitalists...
...but I have not :ard it asserted from any New Yorker, .ve the isolated immigrants from Mt...
...If a library of the year 3000 came into our hands today, we could not understand its contents...
...Of course we need imagination: so does B.B.D...
...The American capitalist whose image reifies in the mind of the young is not even the smug, canny, willful powerbroker of Upton Sinclair...
...but I have yet to come across a single instance where such a scientific pseudo-reputation has been bestowed for political reasons on a scholar of more conservative leanings...
...that sustains, indeed causes to flourish throughgaudy advertising, the popular journals that combine in resolutely fixed ratio, licentious assaults on the venerable, delicately-nurtured restraits on rampant biological appetites, and fundamentalist condemnations of American institutions and ideals...
...That passion for fr( dom that catapulted us two hundr years ago into national independence a into the most exciting attempt in hist( at the incorporation of human freed( into a federal constitution, had by a large reduced to a velleity for some kir of freedom, though a complicated lib tarian vocabulary was constructed purpose of which was to demonstrate tl freedom is in fact enhanced, rather th diminished, when we assign to t government control over our lives...
...lerin, that no respectable canon of redistributive justice recognizes the duty of residents of Detroit, or West Virginia, or Key West—or even Palo Alto—to subsidize the cost of rapid transit in New York City...
...Much there is that we do not know, but some things there are that we do know...
...To hear them uttered by a quiet, profound academician, and reprinted in the Reader's Digest, was something else...
...Hayek, taking the liberty of treating his essay on the intellectuals as something of an afterword to The Road to Serfdom, which it properly is, I think...
...Now this position is something of a caricature, but it is crankily instructive in an age where freedom of expression has brought virtual immunity to those who deceive...
...l one thing, the arguments of the collecl ists are more obviously appealing...
...We would be left, for instance, without any guide to how the liberated taxpayer would spend his repatriated surplus...
...Hayek quotes Dorothy Fosdick in a state of what one can only describe as despair, upon reading John Dewey on the meaning of freedom...
...10 The Alternative: An American Spectator March 1 * * * I elect to touch on these three observations of Mr...
...We must," he says, "make the building of a free society once more an intellectual adventure, a deed of courage...
...And, in an age swooning with passion for a centralized direction of social happiness and economic plenitude, that squirt of ice water, presaged by the quotation he selected as epigraph to his book, the wry observation of David Hume that "it is seldom that liberty of any kind is lost all at once...
...But in a society in which there is also freedom to criticize, the politicians would probably not get away with it exzept for the indulgence of the only class of :itizens professionally trained to isolate lntruth, and shoot it, bang bang, right sown to earth...
...One can only hope that by the time they get around to saying this, they will get around to saying that Hayek won...
...But we can hardly blame him if he sees, with that laser purity of his moral vision, only the silhouettes: American businessmen, like their great-grandfathers trading in the slave market, anxious to turn a profit by trafficking with the contemporary generation of slavemasters...
...The hilarity came alike om the mathematicians and their fellow avelers, whose derisory laughter is even )w renewed with each retelling of the mous episode...
...As the intellectual case against socialism becomes, by experience and analysis, firmer, the threat of socialism becomes, paradoxically, greater...
...He chronicles ndt only the cupidity, but the parasitic habits of so many of them, the predatory character of their belief in the marketplace...
...As we look back on the excitement caused by the publication of Friedrich Hayek's Road to Serfdom, we wonder how it could have happened...
...I do not seek to codify this proposition )y giving it constitutional lineaments, or :ven by proclaiming a Hillsdale Maniesto...
...An extreme example of such sleight of hand is provided by John Dewey when he says: 'If freedom is combined with a reasonable amount of equality, and security is taken to mean cultural and moral security and also material safety, I do not think that security is compatible with anything but freedom.' After redefining two concepts so that they mean approximately the same condition of activity," Miss Fosdick sighs, Dewey "assures us that the two are compatible...
...For all his tergiversations, Mr...
...He went on to discuss a recent exhibit in the Soviet Union of United States anti-criminal technology that engrossed the Russians, who instantly put in orders for the lot, cash on the barrel-head...
...Of a class that—out of cultivated ignorance—permitted Ludwig von Mises and even Hayek to live in an economic insecurity very nearly paralyzing...
...Accordingly, the political authority has no alternative than to usurp...
...This is something which is almost incomprehensible to the human mind," Solzhenitsyn said: "that burning greed for profit which goes beyond all reason, all self-control, all conscience—only to get money...
...How should we consciously determine a future which is, by its very nature, beyond our comprehension...
...If I should happen to make it there, I shall gladly join as a minor member of the chorus, confident that that final act of utopianization will bring my -voice into total harmony with those of the legions who praise his name...
...insisted we must see it—whole or not at all—as springing season after season from a trampoline of assumptions which are the warp and woof of freedom and progress...
...I find it perplexing to combine this high relativism with any notion, however careless, of Utopia...
...The Hillsdale College Press will publish the seven papers presented at the meeting—including Mr...
...The entrepreneurial class can only change its image by-taking lusty joy from its achievements, and by seeing it, as Isabel Paterson...
...The stage...
...What do you have left to teach them...
...In that other world, I do not hesitate to predict, Friedrich von Hayek will be garlanded and praised for his contributions to a social philosophy that reflects the dignity of metaphysical man...
...He wrote, for instance, in The Wealth of Nations that "the late resolution of the Quakers in Pennsylvania to set at liberty all their Negro slaves, may satisfy us that their number cannot be very great...
...How bracing it would have been if, as one man, they had risen to their feet early in the tirade and walked out, leaving the Senator lecturing only to the television cameras, which of course he was primarily addressing...
...Foremost among those -who do so, as a class, are, of course, the politicians...
...The intellectua many of them all along uneasy about t chimerical vanities of utopian socialis...
...I know of nothing in libertarian literature that is instructive on the point...
...Thus he quotes Michael Polanyi as saying a few years after The Road to Serfdom was published, "The conceptions by the light of which men will judge our own ideas in a thousand years—or perhaps even in fifty years—are beyond our guess...
...And although fashionable rhetoric flirts alike with the elasticity of standards (what is freedom...
...Simone Weil's] position is something of a caricature, but it is crankily instructive in an age where freedom of expression has brought virtual immunity to those who deceive...
...to which they send their sons and daughters, for impacted indoctrination in the evils of the society they sustain, or are sustained by...
...But I do propose that we meditate ar more extensively and seriously than ye have done since the publication of The ?oad to Serfdom the civil consequences )f- the extraordinary immunity of the ad'ocates of the superstitions of cornnunism, of socialism, of redistributionsm, of inflation, of dirigisme, from the )ar of public opinion...
...So long as Mr...
...In one of her excellent essays, Simone Weil remarked that Etienne Gilson's account of the history of ancient Greece was factually incorrect in respect of the life of the helots, and that in a just and well-ordered world his book would be suppressed, and he would himself be subject to a civil lawsuit, the plaintiff being the Truth, which, in Simone Weil's society, would have legal standing...
...His contribution to the Ever Normal Granary...
...and therefore any conceits on the matter are quickly seen as ideological vanity, discrediting to the unassuming virtues, however exhilarating when discreetly imputed to human freedom...
...Certainly we need courage, a quality of Evil Knievel as of Thomas More, with, however, a world's discrimination between their use of it, though I do not need to be reminded that Knievel has survived, and More did not...
...and this no political authority—indeed, no animate or inanimate body—can do...
...April he would be lecturing at the University of Moscow...
...If there is so much left for you to discover, a fortiori we can imagine how much there is left for Professor Galbraith to discover...
...Cecil B.- DeMille gave up a million-dollar contract because he refused to pay the sum of one dollar to a labor union with a closed shop...
...ie Alternative: An American Spectator March 1976 11 Recently, addressing the AFL and CIO in Washington, Solzhenitsyn proclaimed the natural alliance of the American worker and the Russian worker in an entirely non-Marxist frame...
...The need for a liberal radicalism is manifest, and no single person living has contributed more than Hayek to an intimation of what such radicalism might bring us by, for instance, a separation of the legislature into two, bodies, the one authorized only to pass laws of the kind associated with the rule of law, laws generic, impartial, intelligible, the structural beams on which the folkways of society weave about like ivy, susceptible to training, direction, fancy, caprice, even...
...That was both audacious and exhilarating...
...But to be apodictic is of course a necessary part of Professor Galbraith's style...
...Professor John Kenneth Galbraith, giving an interview recently to a London journalist, said that he was forced to admit that, whereas fifteen years ago he and his colleagues were pretty well convinced that there were no serious problems left unanswered in economics, he recognizes now how much there is left to discover...
...I proposed to him the first week in April, but he replied, studying his engagement book, that that would not do, that in the first week in...
...But Ralph Nader, the only social hero of our time, is obsessed by how many corn flakes are missing from the package sold at the grocery store, while undisturbed by how many middles are undistributed in the speech of a typical politician of the Left...
...Buckley's—in a book to appear early this year...
...Galbraith continues to teach economics to the Soviet Union, we will have a market for our excess grain...
...today, tomorrow, and always one cannot find in all of Moscow an orthodox Marxist...
...Although Adam Smith did not use the word to describe the instinct of industrial man to improve his lot, he was sardonically aware of the factor of inordinate self-interest, and of the sublimated variations one could play on it...
...Nowhere in the terature does he give way to spite, nothere—quite the contrary—does he sugest that there are ulterior motives in nose who, piping us down the road to erfdom, make the music of abundance nd justice and joy...
...The principal theses of the book are by now so very well known, even if they are not by any means universally accepted, that they appear almost self-evident...
...and I find myself wondering whether the soupy indulgence shown by right-minded intellectuals to those who deceive in order to play out their ideological passions, does not emerge less as an act of intellectual charity, than of...
...It is perhaps the most -equently summoned jape at the expense f representative democracy to recount le story of the earnest legislator who night one day to lighten the load of the :hoolchildren of Indiana by introducing law that would trim down the value of pi om 3.1416 , to the more manageable fig-re of 3. The response was instantaneous...
...Indeed, during the 1930s" his reputation was almost exclusively technical, and we are informed that historians will in due course remark that the great technical debate of the early 1930s was actually between Hayek and Keynes...
...He is right, though less so, by far, than when he wrote those dismaying words, before the great intellectual offensive of the past twenty years, for which he is so substantially responsible, which has left the socialists in disarray...
...is fully set," she writes, "for...
...Hayek brought then a great prestige and a dazzling capacity for synthesis to propositions which, although they had been ably defended over a period of years, were widely thought, by the academic community in particular, to constitute nothing much weightier than the ululations of a propertied class suddenly bereft—in virtue of its incompetence to handle a great depression, and its forfeited authority over public opinion —of power...
...But there is a great and brooding literature that is instructive on such moral matters, but it is a literature that speaks with a humility that goes far beyond the historicistic humility of Michael Folanyi in reminding us that heaven is not for this, but for another world, and that final satisfactions are taken from adventures in faith, hope, and charity unrelated to the marketplace...
...Hayek has complained about the "inferior caliber" of those intellectuals who incline in favor of the free market, bycomparison with those who defend socialism...
...Hayek is so very correct in so much of what he says, one hesitates to cavil, and does so only under the libertine dispensation of this permissive organization...
...are no less entrenched in their distw for the kind of society they understand be the necessary consequence of a ft market economy...
...and indeed if ever his counsel on the matter were accepted, I have no doubt whatever that any society would benefit comprehensively, and that the tuning fork of justice would resonate with the joy of bells in the morning...
...But that greed, which so outraged such resonant critics of the free market as Veblen and Tawney, is less I think a mutation of capitalism, let alone an organic development of it, than a culturally conditioned indifference to principle, a stubborn moral nescience, a fugitive unconcern for cultivation of values only a painstaking care for which can guarantee the survival of free men...
...In his own words, Hayek declares: "it would be an error to believe that, to achieve a higher civilization, we have merely to put into effect the ideas now guiding us...
...One wishes, discreetly, that, as one experiences one's ignorance, pari passu one would lower one's voice...
...What we lack is a liberal Utopia, a program which seems neither a mere defense of things as they are nor a diluted kind of socialism, but a truly liberal radicalism which does not spare the susceptibilities of the mighty...
...If we are to advance, we must leave room for a continuous revision ofour present conceptions and ideals which will be necessitated by further experience...
...deed a contingent happiness...
...The social success of freedom requires something of an extra-ideological devotion to analytical rigor and to the integrity of language...
...Hayek brought, to his thesis the great prestige of an economist unblemished by the tattoo of ideology...
...An American Spectator March 197( great, every recorded intellectual endeavor serving him as a stilt, of great cumulative elevation...
...But before long Hayek was writing that the "hot socialism," as he called it, against which he had polemicized in The Road to Serfdom, was doctrinally dead, but that its "conceptions" had penetrated so deeply into the public consciousness that it mattered not very much that the theology of socialism w discredited, any more than it appears matter greatly that, if we take Solzhen syn's word for it—and I will...
...The problem, Solzhenitsyn pointed out—breaking loose from the disinterested terms of the marketplace—being that we were selling our scientific paraphernalia not to the law-abiding for use against criminals, but to criminals for use against the law-abiding: rather like inventing the guillotine for the purpose of slaughtering cattle, and then selling it to Robespierre in full knowledge of the uses to which he intended to put it...
...Hayek gave an example of his great intellectual courage when, • in his great book on liberty, he girded his loins, kissed goodbye to his wife, made out his will, and came out against the progressive income tax...
...He is the inarticulate, self-conscious, bumbling mechanic of the private sector, struck dumb by the least cliche of socialism, fleeing into the protective arms of government at the least hint of commercial difficulty, delighting secretly in the convenient power of the labor union to negotiate for an entire industry, uniformly successful only in his escapist ambition to grow duller and duller as the years go by, eyes left, beseeching popular favor...
...moral despair, and epistemological pessimism...
...did not come alone from men and omen professionally capable of hanLing .calculus...
...My knowledge of his work is limited to his nontechnical writings, and flawed by my porous memory, but I cannot offhand remember any other call by him to the pursuit of Utopia—which is not even listed as a subject heading in the Constitution of Liberty—nor even Utopia's poor relation, eudaemonia, though am buoyant enough to believe that if we were to follow Hayek's prescriptions., we would come, if not to eudaemonia, least to something not far removed frorr that happiness which results from the governance of reason, always under...
...even if we eschew a redemptive creed should, Hayek says, "offer a new lib program which appeals to the imag: tion...
...Cecil B. DeMille is dead, and all the mighty work of Hayek, and Mises, and Friedman have not bred his replacement...
...Galbraith continues to teach economics to the Soviet Union, we will have a market for our excess grain...
...and with the realizability of Utopia on earth, I find the temptation to the latter illusion less frequent in the work of serious conservatives, or even of dress-suited whigs, than in that of the ideologists who have done so much to wreck our century...
...if we take Solzhenitsyn's word for it and I will...
...O . in selling hot dogs or shampoo...
Vol. 9 • March 1976 • No. 6
