Book Reviews

commitment to nonlibertarian causes. In the middle of it all President L.yndon B. Johnson has become en amoured of a phrase, "the Great Society." Whether he plucked the phrase out of his own memory, or whether it was fed to him by one of the task force papers which Professor Eric Goldman of Prince ton has been in the course of as sembling, is immaterial. The point is that the phrase comes from the title page of a pre-World War I book, The Great Society, by a Fabian socialist Englishman named Graham WaHas. Thus the movement started by Bernard Shaw, H. G. Wells, Mr. and Mrs. Sidney Webb, and the other mem bers of the English Fabian So ciety in the eighties and nineties of the last century is still bearing fruit. Since I have long been inter ested in the relations between ideologues and politicians, I took Graham Wallas's book off the 59 60 THE FREEMAN March dusty shelves the other day and started reading it for the first time in some forty years. As Wallas used the phrase, "the Grea t Society" was merely descriptive of the increasing urbanized con dition of life imposed on the Western world by the spread of the Industrial Revolution. Wallas spoke of the steam engine and the rise of the Manchester cotton mills as imposing an "extension of the social scale" upon the hu man species. The argument is now so familiar as to be platitudinous: the villager in northern Michigan or the Orkney Islands cannot es cape the implications of the in ternational division of labor and the coming of the population ex plosion.

Wallas was not advocating any thing tendentious by his use of the term "the Grea t Society" as a description of an historical trend. But when he came to pro posing means of adaptation to this society ,he could think of nothing better than Fabian pene tration of the economic system by collectivist bureaucrats and collectivist methods. He wanted a Mixed Economy, even though that term had not yet come into general usage in 1914. Modern Variations Lyndon Johnson's use of Gra ham Wallas's book title twists things around a bit. To LBJ's way of thinking, we have not yet arrived at "the Great Society." What the President has in mind when he uses the phrase is not "the extension of social scale" imposed by jet aircraft, or com puters, or automated .factories. The Great Society of Lyndon Johnson's dreams won't be here until we have used modern scien tific developments to eradicate poverty, to give every child a good education, and to make all our communities healthy, happy, and beautiful.

Nobody, of course, can make a brief for poverty, ignorance, and ugliness. But the disturbing thing about the current belated romance with Graham Wallas's Fabian tract of 1914 (which, incidentally, was dedicated to Walter Lipp mann) is that the 1965 program for reaching "the Great Society" has a distinctly Fabian flavor of its own. Those now in the political driver's seat want their own grad ualist approach to federally-sup ported medicine and to Washing ton-directed programs for wiping out pockets of poverty in the Ap palachians and bringing school books and remedial reading teach ers to Harlem and back-of-the yards Chicago. Back in the early nineteen twen ties, when I first read Graham Wallas, I could have been for the 1965 "THE GREAT SOCIETY" 61 current program. But since then the Britain which Wallas hoped to reform by a Fabian "organiza tion of happiness" has given a rather thorough trial to the schemes now being proposed. The result has not been the attain ment of the sort of "Great Society"

which our officeholders want. On the contrary, Britain in 1965 is floundering in a 'most unhappy way. Socialized Medicine Britain has its compulsory med ical insurance program. But it has not been building new hospi .. tals, and doctor friends of mine who are by no means "reactionary" insist that medicine in the Britain of today is in a period of decline. The Bri tish have had to recruit nurses from overseas. Young doc tors have been emigrating to Can ada and Australia. "It's poor med icine for everybody today in Brit ain, and good medicine only for the rich who can pay for private service," says a New Haven, Con necticut, gynecologist, Dr. Vir ginia Stuermer. Using Fabian techniques, Brit ain has been trying to modernize its industry to the point of wiping out poverty. But its steel mill owners frightened by the prob ability of a final nationalization of basic steel-making facilities, have had no incentive to make their plants as efficient as some in the German Ruhr or in Gary, Indiana. The British pound is to day in trouble because Fabian "planning" has kept the British industrial machine from making itself competitive with continental Europe, the United States, and Japan in world markets. Wages in Britain have outpaced pro ductivity increases. Prices are still rising. And the response of the Harold Wilson government to this state of affairs. has been to try to insulate the British economy from that of the outer world by putting a 15 per cent tax on im ports.

The Fabian way is to impose controls from the top in order to "socialize" individual income. The 1965 approach is admittedly a bit different: subsidizing new schemes of production in the mountain backwaters of Kentucky and pay ing for schoolbooks in Manhattan is not all-out socialist "central planning." But the impact on the budget can hurt the currency in which the entire nation does its business. The adoption of the Fabian "inevitability of gradual ism" to the solution of our prob lems necessarily aggrandizes the power of the central state. The Voluntary Way The shame of it is that the present program for attaining the 62 THE FREEMAN March "Great Society" will be imposed from Washington on a nation that has given every indication of solv ing its problems by a combination of voluntary individual action and local, state, and municipal meas ures. I think of Richard Cor nuelle's success in establishing a private reinsurance program for banks which have been lending money to deserving college stu dents. I think of the Western Stu dent Movement, which has been recruiting high-stand university undergraduates to help cut down on school dropouts by offering free tutoring services to slum children in the Los Angeles, San Francisco, and San Diego areas.

Anything that's peaceful and vol untary, as Leonard Read says, is a proper means of getting to the Great Society. Instead, Graham Wallas is being heeded, though his 1914 ideas have already failed wherever they have been tried. ~ ~ THE MIND AND ART OF AL BERT JAY NOCK by Robert M. Crunden (Chicago: Henry Reg nery Company, 1964). 230 pp., $4.95. Reviewed by Robert M. Thornton THIS IS the first full-length study of Albert Jay Nock, and happily for admirers of that "superfluous man" Mr. Crunden's primary in terest is not the personal life of his subject but rather what the man thought and how he came to think it. In a scholarly fashion Crunden tells of Nock's public career as a man of letters and discusses sys tematically the men who exerted the greatest intellectual influence on him - Matthew Arnold, Her bert Spencer, Henry George, and Franz Oppenheimer. He also ex plains Nock's fondness for such diverse personalities as the little appreciated "humorist" of Civil War days, Artemus Ward; the often misunderstood French writer of the sixteenth century, Francis Rabelais; and the can tankerous Mayor of New York in the early 1900's, William Jay Gaynor.

Crunden fully realizes that Nock cannot be neatly pigeon holed. With some justification he might be called a nineteenth cen tury liberal (he was in favor of repealing laws and reducing gov ernment interference to a mini mum) , or a conservative (he wished to preserve everything worth saving and refused to enter tain the illusion that society can and should be made over at the whim of reformers), or a radical (he sought true reforms and scoffed at the superficial changes that usually leave things worse 1965 OTHER BOOKS 63 than before). But Crunden is no doubt right in tagging AlbertJ ay Nock a Jeffersonian, for Nock, like our third President, instinctively championed the cause of individ ual liberty against government intervention, even when the lat ter came disguised as benevo lence. Crunden not only discusses Nock's ideas and the books he read, but he also evaluates the ideas in the air during the man's lifetime. Crunden regards Nock as one of the early challengers of the collectivist ideology that be gan to enj oy popular acceptance during the first half of the twen tieth century; as such, Nock was one of the founding fathers of the present-day libertarian-conserva tive movement.

Nock was one of the few intel lectuals of his day not guilty of what has been called "the treason of the clerks." He never lost his faith in the power of ideas, and thus stood apart from those around him who rushed out to "do something." He knew that right thinking must precede right action and that you change the world only by changing individ uals - a job not to be accom plished by any sort of "machinery" such as world government, dis armament, or welfare legislation. Another thing separating Nock from many "intellectuals" was the essential Christianity behind so many of his views. He opposed government doles, for instance, on the grounds that if it is truly "more blessed to give than to re ceive," then government take over of charity deprives us of one of the great joys of life. He dis trusted many government activ ities, not simply because they were questionable politically and eco nomically but because the totali tarian state encourages a slave mentality among its citizens and discourages the sense of individual responsibility to one's God. It may be argued that Nock was a highly religious man (but not in the conventional sense) although many would class him as a heretic.