Pyromania

With the discussion and debate over the future of social security, I'm starting to feel happily connected again to my "libertarian" roots. I regret that a concomitant of that may be that I alienate some with whom I was (and am) in sympathy regarding the merits of dethroning Saddam Hussein - and may further alienate those patient souls who suffer my ramblings, with yet another reason to doubt my sanity - but, hey ... as I say in my "About Me" section: "I don't believe that a greater sphere of personal liberty would by any means be a painless or perfect curative for various societal ills, but I am strongly drawn to a system which weds maximal rights to responsibilities (consequences), and creates a protected sphere for the culturally antinomian individual"; and, "I err on the side of the individual and the private, vs. the collective and the public."

Consequently, I err on the side of liberty in the great, perennial tension between liberty and equality. In fact, I'd argue that if that ever-elastic epithet, the signatum of which everyone loves to hate, "fascism," has any stable meaning in the common parlance, it connotes a modern regime in which liberty is heedlessly traded for security - in a collective frenzy.

The welfare state (the natural domain of "social security") is not, of course, socialism - though according to Von Mises' celebrated dictum, "Middle of the road policy leads to socialism" (in my view he's correct, in terms of the logic of economic intervention, though certainly is incorrect, existentially). I take serious Leftism very seriously - especially orthodox Marxism, which though considered to be a dead letter by many, is still a doctrine of great explanatory power and comprehensiveness (I don't believe this accounts for its "evangelical" potency during much of the 20th century, by the way, but that's another matter). Thus I often think about socialism vs. the market order, and find that opposition to be absolutely fascinating, in terms of the presuppositions and entailments of each allegiance.

The historical "dialectic," if you will, of the relation of the "free market" - or, rather, the cosmos in which it historically was situated, "Liberalism" - to Socialism was brilliantly encapsulated by one of my heroes, the great English Catholic historian, Christopher Dawson.

"[T]he Socialist criticism of Liberalism was at least in its early form a product of Liberal ideology. It was the extension to a wider class of the ideal which had been at first limited to the politically conscious minority. The fundamental appeal of Socialism lay in its assertion of real social rights against abstract political ones. It is a recall to the same principle which has inspired English Liberalism and which was stated so admirably by one of the spokesmen of Cromwell's army when he declared, 'The poorest he that is in England hath a life to live as the richest he.' ...

"This assertion of the right of every man to live a full human life is the essence of Socialism, and thus far from being in opposition to the Liberal Tradition [namely, the wider tradition of which 19th century Liberalism was a manifestation - Ed.] it is an extension of that tradition from the sphere of law and politics to economics and culture."

Despite this sympathetic reading, Dawson adds,

"Yet it is impossible to ignore the existence of an anti-liberal element in Socialism which has contributed more than any other factor to the breakdown of freedom in the modern world."

(The Judgement of the Nations, "The Failure of Liberalism," 1943)

Why might that be? Putting Dawson's account aside, for a moment, it's instructive to consider the view of Robert Heilbroner - no orthodox Marxist, admittedly, but long a foe of the market order, and a Socialist of a kind - who wrote in 1978:

"Socialism...must depend for its economic direction on some form of planning, and for its culture on some form of commitment to the idea of a morally conscious collectivity....

"If tradition cannot, and the market system should not, underpin the socialist order, we are left with some form of command as the necessary means for securing its continuance and adaptation. Indeed, that is what planning means...

"The factories and stores and farms and shops of a socialist socioeconomic formation must be coordinated...and this coordination must entail obedience to a central plan...

"The rights of individuals to their Millian liberties [are] directly opposed to the basic social commitment to a deliberately embraced collective moral goal... Under socialism, every dissenting voice raises a threat similar to that raised under a democracy by those who preach antidemocracy."

(quoted at The Man who Told the Truth)

While it would be a mistake to assume that this pronunciamento of a once-prominent Leftist is authoritative-normative for all thinkers on the Left, it was the view of a sympathetic theorist.

Ergo, putting the historical record of avowedly "communist" regimes aside, it would be good to know which factors allow simultaneously to square the expected benevolence, "liberation" even, of a society in which private ownership of the means of production has been entirely abolished with the consequent "... revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat, the use of the power of the state as a weapon to destroy every social element which is opposed [to the proletariat], the substitution of the mass for the individual as the centre of all cultural and moral values ..."
(Dawson, ibid.).

In other words, on what reasonable grounds could one expect that this alleged interrugnum would indeed be just that - a temporary, albeit extreme, series of measures, which will eventuate in the evanescence of the state's coercive apparatus, of the "state" itself, even? Is this not, rather, "the idolatry of the state"?