TheMarketForIdeas

Two Transatlantic Transplants

The Austrian-American emigré scholar Peter F. Drucker’s The End of Economic Man (1939) was an early study of the political causes of the rise of totalitarianism. The author began drafting it in 1933 when Hitler first came to power in Germany. Already holding a doctorate in international and public law, the 23-year-old Drucker had begun lecturing as a Dozent at Frankfurt University the previous year. He feared that Hitler would come to power and was prepared to leave Germany. So when, a month after Hitler was appointed chancellor in January, the new Nazi commissar harangued the faculty and forbade the presence of Jews on campus, Drucker abruptly resigned his position and returned to Vienna. He later left for the United States shortly before the Anschluss of 1938.[1] Thus he became part of a large influx of scholars to America – the beginning of what later in the 1950s would be called the “brain drain” from Europe. Drucker eventually became the leading management consultant in the United States.

Even before Drucker published The End of Economic Man, he had begun planning a sequel “that would deal with the future rather than the past, a book that would tackle the political and social integration ahead.” In The Future of Industrial Man (1942), he took what he called a “conservative approach:

“As a philosophical principle, a separation of government in the political sphere from social rule was not new. It is as old as the Christian theory of free government. It was St. Augustine who first separated society: the City of God, from temporal government. . . .

As a working principle of practical politics, however, the separation of government and society originated with the generation of 1776 and 1787 – the Founding Fathers of the American Revolution and the liberal conservatives such as Burke in England. They were the first who clearly recognized it to be the basis of freedom. They also understood that the essence of the solution is the separation of the two spheres and the juxtaposition of two independent spheres of legitimate power. . . .

The basis of this rule was a different one in each sphere: majority consent made government legitimate; private property ruled society. For the economic sphere was the socially constitutive sphere of the nineteenth century. Property rights always limited majority rights and prevented their degeneration into majority rule. Majority rights always checked property rights and prevented their degeneration into plutocracy.”[2]

Drucker argued that the most important consideration is that “a free society and a free government are possible only if there are not one but two competing bases of power: one of social and one of political organization.” This description essentially restates Francis Lieber’s “theory of institutional liberty.”[3] Drucker regarded the American Revolution as a “conservative counter-revolution.” But the political and social integration Drucker anticipated proved elusive. It is worth pondering why. Starting with Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society package of social programs, it has become evident that social organization is being increasingly subordinated to the political organization. By almost every measure – family life, education, the whole social sphere – the decline of societal autonomy has been devastating.

In the foreword to the 1969 edition of The End of Economic Man, Drucker reflected on the political turmoil that accompanied the growing social dislocation in terms that remain all too familiar today:

“The problems of our times [1969] are very different from those of the ‘twenties and ‘thirties, and so are our realities. But some of our reactions to these problems are ominously reminiscent of the ‘despair of the masses’ that plunged Europe into Hitler’s totalitarianism and into World War II. In their behavior some groups – the racists, white and black, but also some of the student ‘activists’ on the so-called Left – are frighteningly reminiscent of Hitler’s stormtroopers – in their refusal to grant any rights, free speech for instance, to anyone else; in their use of character assassination; in their joy in destruction and vandalism. In their rhetoric these groups are odiously similar to Hitler’s speeches and so is the dreary nihilism of their prophets of hatred from Mao to Marcuse.”[4]

Herbert Marcuse, whom Drucker cited as an example of such “dreary nihilism,” had originally been hired by University of Frankfurt Institute for Social Research, the academic home of Marxist critical philosophy. After Hitler took power, he began his work with the Institute in Geneva, then moved to New York in 1934 where a branch opened at Columbia University. In 1942 he was recruited to serve – along with other colleagues – in the wartime Office of Strategic Services (OSS). [5] However, his later works – most notably Eros and Civilization (1955) and One-Dimensional Man (1964) – reveal little sympathy with the American way of life. In an allusion to Ernst Haeckel’s discredited idea that “ontology recapitulates phylogeny,” Marcuse wrote the following in Eros and Civilization about Sigmund Freud’s “reconstruction of the prehistory of mankind from the primal horde through patricide to civilization.”

“If Freud’s hypothesis is not corroborated by any anthropological evidence, it would have to be discarded altogether except for the fact that that it telescopes, in a sequence of catastrophic events, the historical dialectic of domination and thereby elucidates aspects of civilization hitherto unexplained. We use Freud’s anthropological speculation only in this sense: for its symbolic value. . . . If the hypothesis defies common sense, it claims, in its defiance, a truth which common sense has been trained to forget.”[6]

Historical dialectic of domination? Symbolic value? Trained to forget? These phrases are conjurer’s tricks, not serious historical scholarship. And yet Marcuse helped shape the thinking of a generation of American students. By the time he wrote at midcentury, positivist reductionism in the social sciences was spilling out of the laboratory and classroom into society at large. Such reductionism is a natural expression of the interventionist appetites of the modern secular state and its ideological enablers. Later in the book, Marcuse drew on Sigmund Freud’s theories about the sublimation of sex and violence, then claimed he could account for the transformation of repression and domination into the anonymity of administration. He depersonalized domination into a “system” in which the prisoners, in effect, had become their own prison guards.

“The sadistic principals, the capitalist exploiters, have been transformed into salaried members of a bureaucracy, whom their subjects meet as members of another bureaucracy. The pain, frustration, impotence of the individual derive from a highly productive and efficiently functioning systemin which he makes a better living than before. Responsibility for the organization of his life lies with the whole, the ‘system,’ the sum total of the institutions that determine, satisfy, and control his needs. The aggressive impulse plunges into a void – or rather the hate encounters smiling colleagues, busy competitors, obedient officials, helpful social workers who are all innocent victims.

Thus repulsed, aggression is again introjected: not the suppression but the suppressed is guilty.”[7]

Revealingly, Marcuse is echoed by a non-Marxian determinist, the behavioural psychologist B. F. Skinner, who dismisses the ideas of human autonomy, sanctity, and responsibility of human beings. Skinner’s critique of C. S. Lewis’s The Abolition of Man (1943) displays a similar collective “dialectic:”

“C. S. Lewis protested: ‘. . . the power of man to make himself what he pleases . . . means . . . the power of some men to make other men what they please.’ This is inevitable in the nature of cultural evolution. The controlling self must be distinguished from the controlled self, even when they are both inside the same skin, and when control is exercised through the design of an external environment, the selves are, with minor exceptions, distinct.”[8]

Both Marcuse and Skinner are symptomatic of the politicization of everything[9] by converting life into a series of problems to be solved or at least mitigated. By the time Marcuse became a public figure, a new literature of institutional protest was already in the air, including Ken Kesey’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1962) and the early works of Michel Foucault. The enemy now was reduced to a faceless bureaucracy and the campus protest culture became one more element in what Richard Hofstadter called “The Paranoid Style in American Politics.”[10]

Marcuse’s essay “Repressive Tolerance” (1965) asserts that liberal principles of free speech and other freedoms are actually repressive in nature. To counteract them he recommends:

“Withdrawal of tolerance from regressive movements before they can become active; intolerance even toward thought, opinion, and word, and finally, intolerance in the opposite direction, that is, toward the self-styled conservatives, to the political Right – these anti-democratic notions respond to the actual development of the democratic society which has destroyed the basis for universal tolerance.”[11]

Maoist-style self-criticism, which has nineteenth century American utopian socialist antecedents, belongs to a revolutionary strategy to generate single-minded dedication to the revolution. This notion is a symptom of a larger malady: the idea that the issues of life can be resolved or ameliorated through science and organization. But where such “grand schemes” hold sway, what meaning can civil liberty, including free speech, have in such a context? Can dissenting voices be heard or even tolerated?[12] Teach-ins and revolutionary harangues became a major feature of campus life at many American universities during the late 1960s, giving rise to the whole apparatus of what Roger Scruton later called a culture of repudiation.[13]

The Twilight of the Secular Creeds

This raises questions: Are free speech and other civil liberties able to thrive under the sway of authoritarian, even totalitarian, worldviews such as the cultural Marxism espoused by Herbert Marcuse, Antonio Gramsci,[14] and other revolutionary theorists? Can these liberties thrive where government agencies promote and subsidize ideology-based programs such as eugenics, birth control, abortion, and various forms of race- and gender-centred identity politics? What are some of the consequences of states adopting an official ideology or raising taxes to support an establishment of religion or secular ideology?

These are not abstract hypotheticals. Such questions arise out of a long history of official support by agencies of the state which favour religious and public education establishments, corporate subsidies, affirmative discrimination, speech codes, cancel culture, and the like. These actions effectively divide the polity against itself and subordinate the rights and lives of citizens to whatever the public policy of the moment dictates. They have contributed to the secularization of religious institutions, the politicization of ordinary life, and narrowed the great diversity of society via the homogenizing interests of the regime.[15]

Peter Drucker acknowledged how poorly the role of religion was understood by the scholars of his day. He complained that religion – specifically Christianity – had not yet been seriously examined by “contemporary political analysis. Instead, it was dismissed “as an outmoded relic and the churches ineffectual reactionaries.”[16]

“My book, however, has a chapter, ‘The Failure of the Christian Churches,’ which argues that the churches could have been expected to provide the new foundation. In this chapter, the Christian churches are seen as the one potential counterforce and the one available political sanctuary. The contemporaries, thirty years ago, still children of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment and nineteenth-century Anti-Clericalism, tended to ignore the Christian dissenters – from Kierkegaard to the worker-priests of France – as isolated romantics, hopelessly out of touch with reality.”[17]

Even so, Drucker believed “the churches could not, after all, furnish the basis for European society and European politics.” They “cannot (and should not) substitute politics for Grace, and social science for Redemption.” Although he would not have denied that the institutional church played a critical role in engendering the rise of Christendom as the basis for the larger civilization, Drucker recognized “the strength of churches as the conscience of society” while, at the same time, conceding “their incurable weakness as political and social forces in society.”[18] Thus, as he noted: “Western Man – indeed today Man altogether – is not ready to renounce the world. He still looks for secular salvation, if he looks for salvation at all.”[19]

Kenneth Minogue shows where this “dream of political salvation” leads: “Parties at election times compete for votes with promises of benefits, while experience shows that problems are solved, if solved they ever are, only at the cost of creating new ones.”[20] We are losing a sense of human scale. As a result, the various secular political creeds – liberalism, nationalism, socialism, Marxism, fascism – which vie with the church for public influence should be recognized for what they are: identifiably Christian mimics, substitutes, or heresies.

“Unlike every other book of this period, The End of Economic Man explained the tragedy of Europe as the result of a loss of political faith, as a result of the political alienation of the European masses. . . . Central to the Modern Age had been the belief that society could be made rational, could be ordered, controlled, understood. With the collapse of Marxism as a secular creed, society became again irrational, threatening, incomprehensible, menaced by sinister powers against which the individual had no defense. Unemployment and war were the specific ‘demons’ which obsessed the society of the inter-war years. The secular creeds of Liberal Europe – and Marxism was their logical and ultimate formulation and their dead end – could neither banish nor control these forces. Nor could any existing economic or political theory explain them.”[21]

Political and social institutions are distinct spheres with different callings. The role of religion in the social sphere is to help instil virtues of faith, hope, and love which enable individuals, families, and communities to be conscientiously self-governing and mutually responsible rather than mere subjects meant to be “other-directed.”[22]

What Drucker called America’s conservative counter-revolution sprang from very different sources than the total social and political upheaval later engendered by the French Revolution. Additionally, it generated a political and cultural atmosphere – even during the Great Depression – which he found liberating. By taking America’s Christian heritage seriously as a factor in the country’s unique historical development, Drucker had clearly absorbed many of this counter-revolution’s lessons.

Like Alexis de Tocqueville and Francis Lieber, Drucker recognized the central importance of churches and voluntary associations in the development of the habits of self-government:

“Above all, however, American freedom has been resting on American invisible self-government. . . . A man who wants to settle as a lawyer, doctor, or businessman in an English small town tries to get the support and moral backing of the ‘squire’ and of the ‘gentry’; without it he is lost. In Germany – before Hitler – he had to get the support of the government officials on the spot: the local judge, the police chief, the provincial governor, and so on. In this country [America], a newcomer tries to get access to Rotary, the chamber of commerce, a particular church congregation, etc. These spontaneous and voluntary associations are perhaps the strongest antitotalitarian force extant in the present world.”[23]

Drucker then cautioned against any misunderstanding of the causes of this “invisible self-government,” which Francis Lieber labelled “American liberty.”[24] He dismissed the “frontier thesis” of Frederick Jackson Turner, who wrote that “American democracy was born of no theorist's dream; it was not carried in the Susan Constant to Virginia, nor in the Mayflower to Plymouth. It came out of the American forest, and it gained new strength each time it touched a new frontier."[25] Out of the American forest? This is a trope of German Romanticism. Drucker retorted that on the basis of his own analysis of American history

“[I]t appears that the freedom America has been enjoying cannot wholly or even largely attributed to the frontier and to continental expansion. Indeed, there is perhaps no more vicious thesis than that freedom was a by-product of the frontier – except its European counterpart according to which imperialist expansion was the basis of England’s and Europe’s freedom during the nineteenth century. Both statements imply that there can be no freedom without a frontier or without colonial expansion – in other words, that there can be no freedom today.”[26]

In the nineteenth century, a great number of clever, often monocausal theories – Marxism and Darwinism foremost among them – strove to expose and explain various hidden forces at work in society and nature. Herbert Baxter Adams adopted “the germ theory of politics,” which traced the origin of American political institutions to their supposed origin in Anglo-Saxon village institutions.”[27] Henry Adams sought to account for historical phases through the second law of thermodynamics, entropy.[28] Far from being novel, Frederick Jackson Turner's frontier thesis – correlating the open frontier with liberty and democracy – reflected the historicism of earlier continental scholars. [29] This sort of deterministic thinking or “reductionism” has continued to be, perhaps increasingly, characteristic of academic writing and political thinking, especially with the rise of various postmodern literary and social theories.

Drucker presents a very different and richer picture of American freedom which made American expansion possible while withstanding the strain of expansion:

“It is at least arguable that the frontier and the phenomenal material and geographical expansion of America which resulted were at least as much of a strain on freedom as a help. It is highly symptomatic that American independent political thinking ceased almost completely as soon as the explosive development of the frontier started in the middle forties. . . .

It is highly symptomatic that American independent political thinking ceased almost completely as soon as the explosive development of the frontier started in the middle forties. There have been no greater and no more original political thinkers in modern Europe than were produced by the first generation of American independence: Jefferson, Hamilton, Madison, and Marshall.”[30]

Drucker admitted that “the frontier was a tremendous safety valve” which bred “a spirit of equality.” On the other hand, “the frontier and its rapid advance made inevitable the rise of the monopolistic ‘trust,’ although by then “the basis of American freedom was firm enough to stand the strain.”[31] James C. Malin later astutely argued that Turner’s geographic determinism led him in later years, following the closing of the frontier late in the nineteenth century, “to turn to the state as the substitute for the frontier.”[32] Clearly Turner had helped make the idea seem inevitable.

This brings us naturally to review some of the factors that helped make the American experiment so successful during the early Republic despite the difficulties associated with the “peculiar institution” of slavery, the Civil War, and the Westward expansion of the country – each of which complicated the others. One these was the interlocking constitutional mechanism which provided for the rule of law while decentralizing and dividing power under a system of checks and balances.

Parchment Barriers and the Encroaching Spirit of Power

In The Federalist, no. 48 (1 February 1788), part of a series of New York newspaper columns intended to persuade its citizens to ratify the new Constitution, James Madison anticipated some of the chief issues which might undercut its division of powers and carefully constructed checks and balances.

“Will it be sufficient to mark, with precision, the boundaries of these departments, in the constitution of the government, and to trust to these parchment barriers against the encroaching spirit of power? This is the security which appears to have been principally relied on by the compilers of most of the American constitutions. But experience assures us, that the efficacy of the provision has been greatly overrated; and that some more adequate defence is indispensably necessary for the more feeble, against the more powerful members of the government. The legislative department is every where extending the sphere of its activity, and drawing all power into its impetuous vortex.”[33]

Extending the sway of political institutions was certainly a problem in Madison’s eyes. Earlier, on the eighth of June 1787, near the outset of the Constitutional Convention, James Madison proposed amendments to the Virginia Plan, many which he later inserted into the first ten amendments to the Constitution, known as the Bill of Rights (1791). Among the original amendments were the following:

“Fourthly. That in article 1st, section 9, between clauses 3 and 4, be inserted these clauses, to wit: The civil rights of none shall be abridged on account of religious belief or worship, nor shall any national religion be established, nor shall the full and equal rights of conscience be in any manner, or on any pretext, infringed.

The people shall not be deprived or abridged of their right to speak, or to write, or to publish their sentiments; and the freedom of the press, as one of the great bulwarks of liberty, shall be inviolable. The people shall not be restrained from peaceably assembling and consulting for their common good; nor from applying to the Legislature by petitions, remonstrances, for redress of their grievances.”[34]

One of the besetting problems of such “parchment barriers” – which were originally designed to prevent despotism – is how to enforce them in the face of changing perceptions, mores, definitions, and ideologies. The American founders lived in the midst of a protracted intellectual revolution – shaped both by British empiricism and Continental rationalism – which included such figures as Machiavelli, Bacon, Descartes, Hobbes, Milton, and Locke. All but the first lived during the period of religious warfare known as the Thirty Years War, when the nation-state rose to prominence during a time of deeply divided religious loyalties. As A. J. Conyers has summarized:

“The trend toward political hegemony, and the tension that centralized governments experienced with the spontaneous associations that [Michael] Oakeshott saw as the mark of a free society, was already in evidence early in the modern period. Nation-states were necessarily faced with the task of asserting authority from remote centers such as Paris or London. The authority of these social groups is almost always of a religious nature, and religion itself is prodigal in the formation of groups that take on a life of their own. . . . The fact that a public case for a policy of toleration is made beginning in the seventeenth century and gains strength every century after that is most significant. For the reach of “toleration” – defined precisely as modern people alone define it – extends just so far as the new nation-state is making its appearance. Where one appears, the other appears; where the state grows strong, the insistence on toleration grows strong with it.”[35]

The founders’ thought was also shaped by comparable religious currents which gave impetus to novel political experiments in civil liberty and self-government. Such is the imaginative creativity of even the most practical men. Daniel Elazar and Donald Lutz are among the recent American political scientists and legal scholars who have carefully examined this covenantal (federal) tradition and endeavoured to protect a lively balance between unity and diversity – along with the loyalties each dimension claims. [36]

The Perils of Inconsistency

In a chapter entitled “Perils of Inconsistency,” the philosopher Michael Polanyi noted that “the formulation of liberal thought” was “largely determined by the reaction of past generations against the period of religious wars.”[37] He summarized its trajectory in The Logic of Liberty (1951).

“Anglo-American liberalism was first formulated by Milton and Locke. Their argument for freedom of thought was twofold. In its first part (for which we may quote the Areopagitica) freedom from authority is demanded, so that truth may be discovered. The main inspiration of this movement was the struggle of the rising natural sciences against the authority of Aristotle. Its programme was to let everyone state his beliefs, and to allow people to listen and form their own opinion; the ideas which would prevail in a free and open battle of wits would be as close an approximation to the truth as can be humanly achieved. We may call this the anti-authoritarian formula of liberty. Closely related to it is the second half of the argument for liberty, which is based on philosophic doubt. While its origins go back a long way (right to the philosophers of antiquity) this argument was first formulated as a political doctrine by Locke. It says simply that we can never be so sure of the truth in matters of religion as to warrant the imposition of our views on others. These two pleas for freedom of thought were put forward and were accepted by England at a time when religious beliefs were unshaken and indeed dominant throughout the nation. The new tolerance aimed pre-eminently at the reconciliation of different denominations in the service of God.”[38]

The chief difficulties arose with the second part of the formula – a philosophic doubt which is based on a utilitarian calculus – and especially the more extreme formulation of it on the Continent as “radical scepticism,” culminating in the French Revolution and subsequent nihilistic ideologies.[39] Polanyi argued that he considered “the collapse of freedom in Central and Eastern Europe as the outcome of an internal contradiction in the doctrine of liberty.”

“The argument of doubt put forward by Locke in favor of tolerance says that since it is impossible to demonstrate which religion is true, we should admit them all. This implies that we must not impose beliefs that are not demonstrable. Let us apply this doctrine to ethical principles. It follows that unless ethical principles can be demonstrated with certainty, we should refrain from imposing them and should tolerate their total denial. But of course, ethical principles cannot be demonstrated: you cannot prove the obligation to tell the truth, to uphold justice and mercy. It would follow therefore that a system of mendacity, lawlessness, and cruelty is to be accepted as an alternative to ethical principles on equal terms. But a society in which unscrupulous propaganda, violence, and terror prevail offers no scope for tolerance. Here the inconsistency of liberalism based on philosophic doubt becomes apparent: freedom of thought is destroyed by the extension of doubt to the field of traditional ideals.”[40]

Locke’s “doubt” was a gentleman’s agreement which only extended to a choice between various Protestant views. Locke’s utilitarian or hedonistic approach to ethics suggested “that all ideals of good behaviour are merely maxims of prudence. . . . Camouflaged as long-term selfishness, the traditional ideals of man are protected from destruction by scepticism.”[41] This is “too clever by half” and very short-sighted. Toleration based on philosophic doubt is not so much an appreciation of liberty as a utilitarian means of social regulation.[42] Today this tolerant doubt is being replaced by a far more dismissive attitude. Edward G. Andrew has made a similar claim about what he calls “sceptical tolerance:”

“The European and Scottish Enlightenment has built on Locke’s deconstruction of conscience as an innate practical principle, as God within the mind. Moral conduct was to be regulated by the radar of public opinion, by one’s desire for social approval and fear of social censure. The mind is a tabula rasa on which the educators of public tastes can write their progressive opinions and have them reinforced or amended by other enlightened writers. . . . Enlightenment thinkers did not want freedom for conscience; that is, they did not favour the emancipation of intolerant certitude, religious zeal, and revolutionary intransigence. For them, freedom of conscience tended to mean sceptical tolerance, not an immunity or sanctity for conscience.”[43]

Where might this regime of philosophic doubt lead? A more passive consumer culture and a confusion of means with ends. The scope of people’s perceptions changes as their sciences, technologies, laws, and institutions reach new levels of both precision and doubt. The precision of means has led to a series of technological revolutions. Doubt about ends coloured the speculations of the Enlightenment and set into motion – during the French Revolution – an apparatus for purging Christianity and reshaping public opinion by revolutionary means.[44] One entire dimension of human experience – the spiritual realm and the sanctity of conscience – was defined out of existence, first by the revolutionaries, then later by the positivists.

Returning to the problem of “parchment barriers,” Drucker and Polanyi can help us appreciate what John Adams meant when he said: “Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.”[45] American institutions are founded upon ideas and principles which apply to everyone, not upon a utilitarian or pragmatic balancing of interests or identities.

Instead of adhering to recognized ethical principles, the West drifted from latitudinarianism and eclecticism into nihilism by empowering atheistic, materialist, and non-Western religious ideologies – competing ethical systems[46] – untethered by the authority of the Biblical mores which in earlier times had knit families and communities in a web of affection and mutual obligations. Our very language reflects these changes as words lose definition and are enlisted into semantic battles.[47] Ideologies mimic the messianic hopes of Christians and become rival heresies.

The drift away from doctrinal integrity in the churches was a slower process in places where “religious beliefs were unshaken,” as Polanyi remarked. The historian James A. Malin contrasted America’s secular “Enlightenment” inheritance – “glittering, indefinable generalities” of a “fictional ideal” – with the subsequent Second Awakening of Christianity in the early nineteenth century:

“Whatever effect the revolutionary philosophers of the late eighteenth century may have had in modification of religion in the United States, the core of the Christian plan of Salvation survived, regardless of denomination; they could find Salvation only through Divine intervention – the Blood Sacrifice. Christianity and the generalized Idea of Progress were irreconcilable.”[48]

Yet, in the early decades of the twentieth century, the Progressive movement found a home in both major parties. New social sciences and scienced-based professions emerged. German educational and administrative ideas became models for public education and the social sciences. Theological liberalism, a form of Progressivism which attacked the doctrinal foundations of the faith, began capturing the leadership of the mainline denominations. Positivism and behaviourism – forms of reductionism – in the sciences turned them away from whatever cannot be measured or weighed. Soon, the modern administrative state arose during two world wars, the Great Depression, and the rise of a social welfare apparatus earlier pioneered by Christianity – part of the process of secularization of society. The secularization of Christian institutions has followed a trajectory which can be traced back at least three centuries. These consequences were already inherent in the utilitarian ethical approach taken by political philosophers, such as Hobbes and Locke. Leslie Stephen summarized Locke’s views in an unfavourable light:

“A rationalist to the core, he does not even contemplate as possible an appeal to any authority but to that of ordinary reason. The truth of Christianity was to be proved like the proof of any historical or philosophical theory. It was simply a question of evidence, and especially of the overwhelming evidence of the Christian miracles. The fact, indeed, that that those miracles were wrought in confirmation of a perfect system of morality, made it possible to accept them. But the excellence of that system appeared not from transcending the limits of human knowledge, but from its entire coincidence with the teaching of the unassisted intellect. Christianity is regarded less as the revelation of the true relation of man to his Maker than as a new promulgation of the moral law.”[49]

This would make Locke a precursor to the Common Sense philosophy which influenced the Scottish Enlightenment and many of the American founders a century later. Locke’s proofs of Christianity in the Reasonableness of Christianity (1695)[50] did not withstand the later scepticism of a Hume or the reductionism of the positivists once they were emptied of their doctrinal basis. And what Locke regarded as the “perfect system of morality” would eventually be set aside. Substitute faiths have arisen and proliferated ever since, turning John Dewey’s utilitarian hope for “a common faith”[51] into a chaotic consumer market of syncretism.

The Rule of Law Has Become Terribly Thin

Today, in the age of Artificial Intelligence, the world now faces a very steep learning curve to determine how to preserve our humanity – a task for which a utilitarianism based on doubt offers only the coldest comfort. How does humanity adjust to rapid technological change? Will the regime of philosophic doubt continue to disintegrate the traditional moral and religious orientation of people’s lives? It should be evident that efficient quantification is no substitute for a well-cultivated sense of humanity and ethics.

In a discussion of the Marquis de Sade, Aldous Huxley acknowledged that the philosophic revolution which set aside the spiritual dimension contained an element of self-justification:

“No philosophy is completely disinterested. The pure love of truth is always mingled to some extent with the need, consciously or unconsciously felt by even the noblest and most intelligent philosophers, to justify a given form of personal or social behaviour, to rationalize the traditional prejudices of a given class or community. . . .

For myself, as, no doubt, for most of my contemporaries, the philosophy of meaninglessness was essentially an instrument of liberation. The liberation we desired was simultaneously liberation from a certain political and economic system and liberation from a certain system of morality. We objected to the morality because it interfered with our sexual freedom; we objected to the political and economic system because it was unjust. The supporters of these systems claimed that in some way they embodied the meaning (a Christian meaning, they insisted) of the world. There was one admirably simple reason of confuting these people and at the same time justifying ourselves in our political and erotic revolt: we could deny that the world had any meaning whatsoever.”[52]

Whether people wish it or not, reality has a way of compelling individuals and societies to become more discerning, make realistic judgments, and even take sides in order to address the great moral issues of the day. Rather than dismiss earlier traditions and practices as irrelevant, we should acknowledge our human weaknesses and limitations, then seek what we they can teach us, even if they are disapproved or defined out of existence by others and even if we lack a proper calculus with which to measure or weigh them. Traditional education emphasized the disciplines of character formation which enable us to see the interconnectedness of challenges and events, even if they cannot be simplified into factors which can be readily quantified and correlated. What is the purpose of liberty if not to pursue truth?

The liberal arts were meant to liberate. Now they are dominated by those who would bind us to ideological straitjackets. Any regime based on philosophic doubt – including a regime of international human rights – degenerates into contradictions which revolutionaries can exploit. The consequence is what Michael Polanyi called moral inversion. Both Marxism and Nazism began as pseudo-scientific quests for a perfect society:

“Here was set out a scientific Utopia relying for its fulfillment only on violence. Nihilists could accept, and would eagerly embrace, such a prophecy, which required from its disciples no other belief than that in the force of bodily appetites and yet at the same time satisfied their most extravagant moral hopes. Their sense of righteousness was thus reinforced by a calculated brutality, born of scientific self-assurance. There emerged the modern fanatic, armoured with impenetrable scepticism.”[53]

Roger Scruton’s culture of repudiation has spread into every aspect of academic life and much of society. Frank Furedi calls it The War on the Past.[54] Rewriting the past is where revolutions begin to rewrite the present and future. A secularized humanitarianism is a poor substitute for Christianity. Starting with a vaguely Christian ethic, the adherents of our regimes of philosophic doubt have – during the past century – rationalized their way into programs of eugenics, social engineering, euthanasia, and more. In the absence of clear moral authority, the rule of law is terribly insecure and often unenforced. Justice is rendered both unequal and uncertain.

Photo source: PxHere.com [1], [2].

Notes:

[1]Peter F. Drucker, Adventures of a Bystander (New York: Harper & Row, 1979) 158-65.

[2]Peter F. Drucker, The Future of Industrial Man: A Conservative Approach (New York: The Mentor Executive Library, 1965 [1942]) 134-35.

[3]Steven Alan Samson, “Francis Lieber’s Theory of Institutional Liberty,” Journal of Christian Reconstruction, XIV, 2 (Spring 1997): 155-74. https://facultyshare.liberty.edu/ws/portalfiles/portal/39808328/fulltext.pdf

[4]Peter F. Drucker, The End of Economic Man: The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Harper Colophon, 1969) xxii-xxiii.

[5]On the founding of the Frankfurt School, see Ralph de Toledano, Cry Havoc! The Great American Bring-down and How It Happened (Washington: Anthem Books, 2006) 21-28. Marcuse achieved notoriety for his campus activism in the 1960s and 1970s.

[6]Herbert Marcuse, Eros and Civilization: A Philosophical Inquiry into Freud (New York: Vintage Books) 54, 55.

[7]Ibid. 89-90.

[8]B. F. Skinner, Beyond Freedom and Dignity (New York: Bantam, 1971) 197. See C. S. Lewis, The Abolition of Man: or Reflections on Education with Special Reference to the Teaching of English in the Upper Forms of Schools (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1965 [1943]), 68-69, 71.

[9]Francis Lieber wrote about three gusts of passion that were driving Americans to disunion in 1859: the flattery of the people, the disrepute of politics, and the politicization of everything. They have not diminished. Francis Lieber, Miscellaneous Writings, vol. 1: Reminiscences, Addresses, and Essays (J. B. Lippincott, 1881) 383-84.

[10]Richard Hofstadter, The Paranoid Style of American Politics and Other Essays (New York: Vintage, 1967).

[11]Robert Paul Wolff, Barrington Moore, Jr., Herbert Marcuse, A Critique of Pure Tolerance (Boston: Beacon Press, 1965) 110-11. Rather than continue to accept a toleration which places doubt at its center, Marcuse wanted an abolition of the older orthodoxy.

[12]See, for example, The Dan Bongino Show, March 14, 2026: “Yesterday’s show was a wakeup call. The video of the young man so casually discussing a plot to brutally murder another conservative commentator during a debate, was troubling to watch. I’m having a really hard time processing how we got here. Yes, we live in a peerless country, full of kind-hearted and giving people. But there’s a festering infection growing, and it must be stopped. Arendt’s “banality of evil” is on my mind often lately. People I once respected have let the evil in, and it’s spreading as they give it a microphone and a megaphone. I wonder where I went wrong as well. How could I have so misjudged them? This is not an academic issue. We’ve seen where this goes. Death and destruction are the final chapters of this book in every version, and in every place it surfaces. I fear we are running out of time. I hope I’m wrong.” https://www.facebook.com/photo/?fbid=1556020355883019&set=a.441920487293017

[13]Roger Scruton, The West and the Rest: Globalization and the Terrorist Threat (Wilmington, DE: Intercollegiate Studies Institute, 2002) 71.

[14]See Steven Alan Samson, “A Strategy of Subversion,” The Market for Ideas, 22 (Mar.-Apr. 2020).

 http://www.themarketforideas.com/a-strategy-of-subversion-a541/

[15]This “empire-building” pattern of large systems, as they move toward controlling the margins of their operation, may be detected in a variety of areas. See Steven Alan Samson, “Technology’s Dominion: An Ever-Tightening Web of Dependency,” The Market for Ideas, 31 (Sep.-Oct. 2021) https://www.themarketforideas.com/technologys-dominion-an-ever-tightening-web-of-dependency-a693/;

and Steven Alan Samson, “Faustian Bargains: Entanglements Between Church and State in America,” The Western Australian Jurist, 2 (2011): 61-92. https://classic.austlii.edu.au/au/journals/WAJurist/2011/2.html

[16]Drucker, End x.

[17]Ibid. x-xi.

[18]Ibid. xii.

[19]Ibid. xi.

[20]Kenneth Minogue, Politics: A Very Short Introduction (New York: Oxford, 1995) 91.

[21]Ibid. ix-x. See also Harvey C. Mansfield, The Rise and Fall of Rational Control: The History of Modern Political Philosophy (Cambridge, MA; The Belknap Press of Harvard University, 2026).

[22]David Riesman, with Nathan Glazer and Reuel Denney, The Lonely Crowd: A Study of the Changing American Character (New York: Doubleday Anchor Books, 195t3 [1950]) 34-38.

[23]Drucker, Future 172-73.

[24]Francis Lieber, On Civil Liberty and Self-Government, 3rd ed. (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1877 [1853]) 256-69.

[25]Drucker, Future 172. Frederick Jackson Turner, “The Significance of the Frontier in American History” (1893) was originally delivered in Chicago at a meeting of the American Historical Association. The quote is from the 1920 expanded version. The phrase “new frontier” was later adopted as a political slogan during the Kennedy Administration. https://www.gutenberg.org/files/22994/22994-h/22994-h.htm

For another critique of Turner’s frontier thesis, see Henry Nash Smith, Virgin Land: The American West as Symbol and Myth (New York: Vintage, 1950) 291-305.

[26]172-73. Drucker applied a similar analysis to English freedom, arguing that it was largely the story of the limitation of parliamentary sovereignty and majority government rather than their creation. Much can be said for other monocausal theories like the 1619 Project.

[27]Adams earned his Ph.D. at Heidelberg University. The formulation of his thesis appears colored by German Romanticism. In fact, he wrote a study entitled “The Germanic Origin of New England Towns.” https://www.britannica.com/biography/Herbert-Baxter-Adams

[28]See Henry Adams, The Degradation of the Democratic Dogma (New York: Macmillan, 1920).

[29]Turner was a student of Herbert Baxter Adams, who earned his Ph.D. at Heidelberg. See Smith, Virgin 292.

[30]Drucker, Future 173.

[31]Ibid. 173.

[32]James C. Malin, The Contriving Brain and the Skillful Hand in the United States: Something About History and Philosophy of History (Ann Arbor, MI: Edwards Brothers, 1955) 341.

[33]https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Madison/01-10-02-0269

[34]https://www.archives.gov/files/legislative/resources/education/bill-of-rights/images/madison.pdf

[35]A. J. Conyers, The Long Truce: How Toleration Made the World Safe for Power and Profit (Dallas: Spence, 2001) 61, 62. Conyer’s remark on Oakeshott was alluding to Oakeshott’s critique of Thomas Hobbes who, he believed, wanted to replace the moral “ought” with “human intention, by the will.” Ibid. 7.

[36]See Daniel J. Elazar, “Covenant and the American Founding,” at http://www.jcpa.org/dje/articles/cov-amer.htm and Donald S. Lutz, ed. Colonial Origins of the American Constitution: A Documentary History (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1998).

[37]Michael Polanyi, The Logic of Liberty: Reflections and Rejoinders (Carmel, IN: LibertyFund, 1998) 116. See also Stephen Toulmin, Cosmopolis: The Hidden Agenda of Modernity (New York: Free Press, 1990).

[38]Ibid. 117.

[39]Ibid. 116-17. See. Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn, Leftism: From de Sade and Marx to Hitler and Marcuse (New Rochelle, NY: Arlington House, 1974).

[40]Ibid. 120-21.

[41]Ibid. 121.

[42]See chapter 10, “Social Regulation,” in Steven Alan Samson, Crossed Swords: Entanglements Between Church and State in America (Ph.D. dissertation, University of Oregon, 1984). https://digitalcommons.liberty.edu/fac_dis/129/

[43]Edward G. Andrew, Conscience and Its Critics: Protestant Conscience, Enlightenment Reason, and Modern Subjectivity (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2001) 179. An understanding of this dynamic makes it easier to account for the establishment of secular public education and the creation of essentially permanent broadcasting networks, as well as why some political parties and elites wish to justify mass immigration into their countries, require mail-in ballots, or refuse to require or even permit the use of voter identity cards at polling places.

[44]Modern journalism as the “Fourth Estate” has revolutionary roots. See James H. Billington, Fire in the Minds of Men: Origins of the Revolutionary Faith (New York: Basic Books, 1980) 306-23.

[45]John Adams, “To the Officers of the First Brigade of the Third Division of the Militia of Massachusetts”

(11 October 1798). https://oll.libertyfund.org/titles/adams-the-works-of-john-adams-vol-9-letters-and-state-papers-1799-1811#lf1431-09_head_222

[46]James Hitchcock, "Competing Ethical Systems," Imprimis (April 1981) 1. Harold Berman, who argued for a religious and against an instrumental – utilitarian – conception of law, believed that a profound shift toward an exclusively secular theory of law had taken place during the previous two generations. As a result, law was becoming unenforceable to the extent that it was seen merely as something expedient or arbitrary. "If law is to be measured only by standards of experience, or workability, and not by standards of truth or rightness, then it will be difficult to enforce it against those who think it does not serve their interests . . . . One who rules by law is not compelled to be everywhere with his police force. I think this point is proved today in a negative way by the fact that in our cities that branch of the law in which the sanctions are most severe, namely the criminal law, has been powerless to create fear when it has failed to create respect by other means." Harold Berman, "The Interaction of Law and Religion," Mercer Law Review, 31 (1980): 409.

[47]See the section “Words in Power” following the introduction to Niccolò Machiavelli, The Prince, trans. and ed. Angelo M. Codevilla (New Haven, CT: Yale University Pres, 1997) xix-xxxviii.

[48]Malin, Contriving 14, 16.

[49]Quoted in John H. Hallowell, Main Currents in Modern Political Thought (New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1950) 121. Locke’s political views are likely to have been influenced by Anthony Ashley Cooper, later the first Lord Shaftesbury, in whose household he lived. See D. A. Lloyd Thomas, Routledge Philosophy Guide to Locke on Government (London: Routledge, 1995) 4-7.

[50]See the concluding section 252 in John Locke, The Reasonableness of Christianity as Delivered in the Scriptures (Chicago: Gateway, 1965) 192-95.

[51]John Dewey appears to have regarded the marginalization, if not the elimination, of what he called "spiritual aristocracy" as one of the chief tasks of democratic education. "I cannot understand how any realization of the democratic ideal in human affairs is possible without surrender of the conception of the basic division [between sheep and goats] to which supernatural Christianity is committed." John Dewey, A Common Faith (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1934) 84.

[52]Aldous Huxley, Ends and Means: An Enquiry into the Nature of Ideals and into the Methods Employed for their Realization (London: Chatto & Windus, 1946 [1937]) 272-73. Gary North used a portion of this quote as an epigraph to his essay, “From Cosmic Purposelessness to Humanistic Sovereignty,” which is a trenchant critique of modern thought. Gary North. The Dominion Covenant: Genesis (Tyler, TX: Institute for Christian Economics, 1982) 244.

[53]Polanyi, Logic 130.

[54]See Frank Furedi, The War Against the Past: Why the West Must Fight for Its History (Cambridge, UK: Polity, 2024), esp. chapter 6: “The Struggle to Control Language.”