Book Reviews

"""'<;'~ "<:::... ;./,/' "\"""'''' ./..::/" .:~ e Tyeo6~·· " ".", i, '-'"'""""'"H'::; ""'~'-" _ l Theiocl}e\J nd ii,,> \\ '\,\ No SINGLE person starts a move ment. In the late Nineteen Thir ties, when the so-called intellectu als were moving in droves to the Left, there were still a few strag gling advocates of what Leonard Read speaks of as the "freedom philosophy." The stragglers, how ever, weren't very clear about fun damentals. To indulge in some personal reminiscence, I was impressed with Albert Jay Nock's Our En emy, The State but troubled by Nock's Single Tax panacea, which would have made the State our universal landlord. The anti-Com munists - Eugene Lyons, Ben Stolberg and others in the group that asked for asylum for Leon Trotsky on a purely civil liber tarian basis - were fighting an obvious enemy, but they didn't have any positive theory of indi vidual freedom. Out on the West Coast Leonard Read was reading Bastiat and organizing something called Pamphleteers, Inc., but he was practically unknown on the Eastern seaboard.

It was a strange, confusing time. The New Deal had flopped; if unemployment was coming to an end it was because war indus tries were starting up. As Ran dolph Bourne had put it, war was "the health of the State," proving the futility of expecting govern ment to run a peacetime economy. I don't know how it was with others, but it took two books by women, each published in 1943, to put my own groping thoughts about the inequity of government enterprise into focus. The first book was Isabel Paterson's The God of the Machine; the second was Rose Wilder Lane's The Dis covery of Freedom. In their dif ferent ways Mrs. Paterson and Mrs. Lane analyzed the relations between individual rights and the 699 700 THE FREEMAN November release of energy. Tracing the "long circuit of energy" from its origins in free individual choice to its institutional embodiment in voluntary assocations of one sort or another, the two women arrived at an identical conclusion: only under a Madisonian checks-and balances system, with government limited to defense, police power and courts-of-justice functions, could humanity thrive.

The odd thing about it was that the two women were not friends; Isabel Paterson could not forgive Rose Wilder Lane for having been a socialist in the days when Jack London was helping to organize the Intercollegiate Socialist Soci ety. This was Isabel's mistake: she could not see that some people have to learn from experience, as Mrs. Lane learned when she ob served, from close up, what Fabi anism and its harsher brother, Leninist Bolshevism, had done to stop the flow of energy in Europe and countries of the East. Signifi cantly, both Mrs. Paterson and Mrs. Lane had grown up on the American frontier, where free dom was most uninhibited. They should have been friends. Working from Principle When Rose Wilder Lane really latched on to a principle, she lived it. Although she insisted that she never did things out of a desire to be of "service" (she hated pro"" fessional Do-Gooders because they usually worked with extorted "other people's money"), she could be a twelve - hour - a -day letter wri ter in behalf of spreading her philosophy. In the Thirties she gave up writing her bestselling fiction because she objected to pay ing income taxes to finance com pulsory social security and the various bureaucracies of the Roos eveltian Welfare State. Her tor rential energies were spent on raising her own food on a few acres outside of Danbury, Connec ticut (she refused to have any thing to do with ration cards dur ing the war), and on defending and amplifying the "freedom phi losophy" in her correspondence with numerous people.

There must be hundreds of Rose Wilder Lane letters in vari ous files. Roger Lea MacBride has limited his selection for The Lady and the Tycoon (Caxton Printers, $5.95) to the "best of letters be tween Rose Wilder Lane and Jasper Crane." There are 387 pages of these, which is surely enough to present an entirely rep resentative sample of Mrs. Lane's thinking over a quarter of a cen tury. Jasper Crane, the "tycoon" to whom Mrs. Lane addressed her thoughts about freedom, had map ped out a "freedom philosophy"

1973 THE LADY AND THE TYCOON 701 for himself partly by long and arduous thinking about his ex perience in industry (he was a Du Pont Company executive) and partly by his reading, which ex tended from Biblical studies to the papers of James Madison. He was a most understanding corre spondent whose short commenda tions and ripostes brought out the most able sort of exposition from Mrs. Lane. The fact that he hap pened to be a tycoon (meaning a monied industrialist) meant little to Mrs. Lane, who didn't think movements thrived on money. The Fabians and early socialists had worked best when lean and hun gry. She liked Jasper Crane be cause he was an activist who agreed with her that all too many Big Businessmen had no sense of the philosophical underpinnings of their own originally free system. Organizational Activity Rose Wilder Lane had no belief in organizations as such; she felt in her bones that the end of the Twentieth Century would see a great renascence of individualist thinking simply because dedicated young people had begun to see through the pretensions of the Welfare State. She was not, however, wholly consistent in her attitude toward organizations.

Many of her letters to Jasper Crane were devoted to thinking about ways and means of making the Mont Pelerin Society more effective, which meant that she approved of its founding in the first place. Reading this selection from the Lane - Crane correspondence, one gets a very real sense of how the opposition to State intervention ism of all sorts has grown from practically nothing in 1943 to be come a most impressive movement in the early Nineteen Seventies. Where once there were two wom en writing books, a handful of Vienna school economists (Von Mises and his followers) teaching in odd corners of our educational system, and a Leonard Read with the idea of the Foundation for Economic Education at the back of his head, there are now a score of freedom publications (The Free man, Human Events, National Re v,iew, New Guard, The Alter native, Modern Age, et cetera), a plethora of "conservative"

(meaning old-fashioned liberal) newspaper columnists, good schools (Hillsdale and Rockford College, to name a couple), flourishing so cieties (Mont Pelerin, the Phila delphia Society), foundations (FEE itself, the Institute for Humane Studies, et cetera) and a scattered but effective base in the older university world (the Hoov er Institution at Stanford, for ex ample) .

702 THE FREEMAN November The Eternal Optimist Rose Wilder Lane, the eternal optimist, kept pointing out the growth of understanding about liberty to Jasper Crane, who was inclined on occasion to lament the difficulties encountered by liber tarians. Speaking of my own The Roots of Capitalism, Mr. Crane told Rose Lane that I did it "with quite inadequate monetary re ward." I earned enough from it to finance the period engaged in its researching and writing, which means that I got an education for free from doing it, a quite ade quate compensation. My only wish is that someone would keep the book in print without worrying about paying royalties until the cost of a new edition had been en tirely absorbed. No mystic, Mrs. Lane felt that moral law existed in the grain of God's universe on the same plane as the "natural" laws of physics, chemistry and astronomy. As she saw it, one gets one's comeup pance for murder or theft even as one is hurt if he or she steps out of a second-story window. By the same token societies get their comeuppance when they depart from the "natural" laws that gov ern the release of human energy.

Everything in Rose Wilder Lane's world moved toward consistency, which is what makes her letters a most treasured experience to read. ~ THE POLITICAL ILLUSION by Jacques Ellul (New York: Vintage Books, 1972, 258 pp. $1.95) Reviewed by Haven Bradford Gow THIS is not a witty or eloquent work, but it certainly is a book which contains much wisdom. The author, Jacques Ellul, is an emi nent French social philosopher, currently professor of law and his tory at the University of Bor deaux. He is the author of a num ber of seminal works, among which are The Technological Society and False Presence of the Kingdom. The Technological Society, the author's best-known work, is an examination of the technical view of life - modern man's obsession with means, with techniques, espe cially in the political order. This preoccupation with techniques in the political sphere is alarming, warns Ellul, for then moral and even personal considerations are shunted aside; and such values as freedom and justice are subordi nated to the val~e of "efficiency."

False Presence of the Kingdon~ is an angry discussion of the polit icization of the Church. It is not the function of the Church to formulate grandiose social, eco nomic and political programs to achieve The Great Society, Ellul declares, but increasing numbers of church leaders have come to believe that "politics constitutes a 1973 OTHER BOOKS 703 sort of ultimate issue." For them, "Politics becomes a test of the sin cerity of one's faith. The political order takes on such importance that all teaching seems to con verge on this entrance into poli tics . . . The political issue be comes ultimate to such an extent that persons and churches are judged in terms of political cri teria." Like the previous work, The Politic'al Illusion concerns the re lation of the religious to the social and political orders. But more than that, it deals with contemporary man's idolization of politics, and his conversion of all questions into political questions. "It is no longer true," Ellul tells us, "that the bet ter part of all questions facing a society is not political. And even if a question is in no way political, it becomes political and looks to the state for an answer. It is wrong to say that politics is every thing, but it is a fact that in our society everything has become po litical. ... "

The evidences of our political obsession are everywhere around us, contends Ellul, and we only have to reflect upon our common experience to know that this is so. For example, there is an increas ing tendency to view events and persons exclusi vely in terms of politics; to place everything in the hands of the state; to appeal to the state in all circumstances; to subordinate the dilemmas of the indi vid ual to those of the group; to believe that everyone is quali fied to deal with political affairs. All these, the author tells us, re veal modern man's obsession with politics and the widespread ac ceptance of "the political illusion." There are three aspects to this illusion. The first concerns control of the state. The author observes that, despite what those living in a democracy have been led to be lieve, "the people" do not really control the state by their ballots. While "the people" control to a certain extent who is on top of the pyramid, they do not in fact con trol the state, for their elected representatives cannot effectively deal with the behemoth under them. Even when the leaders at the top are changed, there is little chance for reform, since the lead ers are slaves to political pressure groups, the bureaucracy, and the technical experts they employ.

The second aspect concerns pop ular participation and the notion that, though they do not control the state, "the people" neverthe less participate substantially in its doings. This is just another illu sion, says Ellul, for even as their ballots cannot control the course of events, the organizations of "the people" - for example, parties and trade unions - do not channel 704 THE FREEMAN November popular desires so as to make them effective. Why? Because these or ganizations demand men at the top who are professional politi cians whose main and probably only concern is to attain and con serve power against rivals in their own and in other camps. The final aspect involves the be lief that ultimately all problems are reducible to the political order, and therefore demand purely po litical "solutions." This doctrine, contends the author, has contrib uted to the growth of the state, its powers of organization, and its re sponsibilities. Not only is govern mental action" being applied in in creasing numbers of realms, but the means through which the state can act are growing too. All this seems to go hand in hand with in evitable centralization and with the total organization of society in the hands of the state.

The perennial problems of the human condition are, at bottom, moral and religious; the crisis we face in the West is of the spirit, and it is a crisis which for better or worse is beyond the competence of politics to deal with. It is our good fortune to have the likes of Jacques Ellul around to remind us that when we disregard that truth, when we mistakenly assume that political remedies can resolve wha t really are disorders of the spirit demanding religious solu tions, the tragic and inevitable re sult is not heaven-on-earth, but rather hell. HANDSOME BLUE LEATHERLEX FREEMAN BINDERS $2.50 each ORDER FROM: THE FOUNDATION FOR EC()NOt\~IC EDUCATION IRVINGTON-ON-HUDSON, NEV\' YORK 10533 the Freeman VOL. 23, NO. 12 • DECEMBER 1973 Two Experiences Herbertv. Prochnow 707 In viewing the ruins of earlier civilizations, what may we say of our own? Mr. Mencken on Liberty George H. Douglas 709 A refreshing review of a past master in his suspicion of political reformers.