Book Reviews

A REVIEWER'S NOTEBOOK JOHN CHAMBERLAIN The Roots Of American Order I DON'T KNOW what I expected when I heard that Russell Kirk was writing a big book on the nurturing of American religious, social and political beliefs. All I can say is that his The Roots of American Order (Open Court, $15.00) comes as a total surprise. It is the incredible scope of the book that is staggering. Even more remarkable, it is as deep as it is wide, relating order in the soul to order in the State in mas terly fashion. Kirk has always been good at intellectual portrai ture, but this book combines his old forte with the qualities of a great mural. Where others have sought to prove that conservatism has been an exotic plant in Amer ica, Kirk makes it plain that we have been much more firmly rooted in conservative western values,. stoic as as well as Christian, than most modern commentators have supposed. 124 Others, before Kirk, had made the point that the American Rev olution, unlike the French up heaval that occurred a few years later, was a defensive operation designed to preserve old liberties rather than to force a radical change in society. Peter Drucker, wri ting in 1942, had spoken of "The Conservative Counter-Revo lution of 1776." This was my first encounter with a perspective that really explained our origins as a free nation. True enough, Drucker had drawn some conclusions that were fairly explicit in Edmund Burke if one is to put the famous Anglo-Irish Whig's speech on conciliation with America to gether with his Re/lections on the Revolution in France. But Burke had been forgotten by an ignorant generation before Drucker came along to remind us that Washing ton, Jefferson, John Adams and 1975 THE ROOTS OF AMERICAN ORDER 125 the other architects of our fed eral union were not revolutionists.

It was King George III, with his desire to restore a royal absolut ism, who was the real incendiary. Kirk, as our foremost Burkean, naturally follows Drucker. But he is much more than an expositor of Burkean conservatism. He is an encyclopedist by temperament, and an inveterate educator who wants his students to go back, back, back into history before pro nouncing on "relevance" for the present. The Roots of American Order is a searching study of the origins of the Hebraic-Graeco Roman West before it narrows its focus in the later chapters to con centrate on what the Founding Fathers wrote into the Declaration of Independence and the Ameri can Constitution. The Historical Background What we get in the Kirk book is a study of Israel and Revela tion, a dissertation on the glories and shortcomings of the Greek polis, a celebration of the high old Roman virtue before Latinity had been overwhelmed by decay from within and the Germanic barbari ans from without, an account of the spread of Christianity from the Mediterranean world into Europe's Gothic North, and an outline of the "dissidence of dis sent" as the Reformation splintered the Catholic synthesis. Kirk gets it all down in order to explain the origins of the "chartered rights of Englishmen" before any single one of those rights had been transplanted to North America.

Everything is here from William of Occam, the medieval "nominal ist" who was really the "realist," to the development of the English Common Law and the rise of the Scottish universities. It is an in tellectual feast covering two mil lennia. Most interesting, it reveals something that I did not know when I was reading Peter Drucker in 1942. Who but Russell Kirk could tell us that John Quincy Adams, in his effort to perfect his German in 1800, had translated a long essay from the Berlin His torisches Journal by a young Pruss ian named Friedrich Gentz? Gentz, a reader of Burke, made what Kirk calls "the best brief ear ly analysis of the distinction" between the American and the French Revolutions. If the world had only read and pondered Gentz, we could have been spared the modern revolutions of Lenin and Hitler. Unfortunately, John Quincy Adams was not a great popularizer. If Kirk's digression on John Quincy Adams and Friedrich Gentz makes Peter Drucker seem less of a pioneer, it doesn't make 126 THE FREEMAN February Drucker's point, which was also Burke's point, any less valid. And, indeed, Russell. Kirk would be the first to say there are no new truths. There are only recoveries of what Kirk is fond of calling "the Permanent. Things."

Imagination Rules The Roots of American Order is .something of a paradox. It is stimulating intellectual history of the first order. Russell Kirk can summarize concisely what Thom as Hobbes had to say about the Leviathan state, or what John Locke contributed to the labor theory of value, or what Saint Augustine did to distinguish be tween the City· of This Earth and the· City of God. But in spite of his own ability to reason, and to present things in rational order, Kirk believes that . it is imagina tion, not dialectics, that rules the world. Locke, with his triad of Life, Liberty and Property (or Estate), appealed to the American colonists, not because he had any thing new to s~y, but because, in sofar as he may have been an im portantcontributor to .the Revo lution, he merely confirmed what people already knew from .their experiences during a hundred and fifty years of "salutary neglect"

ona new continent. Like Burke, Kirk continually stresses the im portance of immemorial custom. He distrusts Reason, as .Reason has been defined by ideologues. In this view of things, intuition must be trusted - which is not exactly an intellectual position. But, as Kirk, followjng Hume, points out, .life is rooted in "enor mous mysteries.". What has come into being through prescription is not lightly to be dismissed. A people committed to following precedent may be slow to improve their condition, but, in. the end, they will do. better than those so cieties that chase after Utopian reformers. The Founding Fathers read Montesquieu on the Separation of the Powers. Kirk approves of Montesquieu, who was a most moderate Frenchman. But did Montesquieu really account for the form of our government and the wording of our constitution? Kirk would say no. The larger federal ism of the thirteen states was· a mere adaptation of the smaller federalism that the colonists had practiced in Virginia for a cen tury in which local county govern ment had distrusted rule from the capital in Williamsburg.

The theorist, in the Kirk view of things, is mainly important be cause he discloses to people. what they .instinctively know to be right. The "law" already exists before the. formulator comes along to. divine it and refine it.

1975 THE ROOTS OF AMERICANORDER 127 The Compact Kirk is hard on compact theory. Hobbes, he thinks, was wrong in .attributing the' origins of the State toa compact under which people decided to accept a tyrant as preferable to life in a state of brutish nature. And Locke could point to no antique tribal conclave in which people' set up government to·· protect individual liberties and property. But if the State, as Al bert Nock and Franz Oppen heimer thought, originated in con quest, it nonetheless remains true that conquerers have always had to give ground even to serfs' and slaves in order' to get production out of them. So "compacts" were forced from time to time as under lying populations exerted pres sures as a condition of giving good service. The church in the Middle Ages exacted compacts from kings. As more and more "chartered liberties" come into formal' existence, the Myth of the Compact inevitably became a vital reality.

The' myth was real to Thomas Jefferson. Therereally was a com pact made between the states as states at our Constitutional con vention. As James Jackson Kil patrick pointed out some years ago. in his The Sovereign States, it wasn't "we the people" who made a compact. It was Virginia and New York and other states that relinquished certain powers (such as the right to coin money or make foreign alliances) in re turn for keeping other powers un der the Tenth Amendment. Russell Kirk tends to be con temptuous of this element of com pact theory. But he really accepts the Myth of the Compact when he commends Burke's contract of Eternal Society. His own compact theory is richer than Locke's and more humane than Hobbes'. He should recognize it for what it is. But this is a minor flaw in what indubitably is a grand book. ~ MISES MADE EASIER: A Glos sary for Ludwig von Mises' HU MAN ACTION, prepared by Percy L. Greaves, Jr. (Dobbs Ferry, New York: Free Market Books, 1974) 157 pp., $6.

Reviewed by William Rickenbacker ONE OF THE TRAGEDIES of modern times is that our society seems to have lost the ability to find and use the knowledge that might help it to improve its condition. One may think of several reasons 'for this deprivation. The matters to be discussed -weaponry, ecology, diplomacy, monetary theory - are complex. The people are more in terested ill amusements than in severe study of public questions.

128 THE FREEMAN February T his book also is available from The Foundation for Economic Edu cation, Irvington-on-Hudson, N. Y. Nevertheless, any venture in making the book more accessible to the reading public must be greeted with applause, and here's a hip and a hooray for Percy Greaves' contribution to the cause. He has picked out about 900 of the most difficult words or phrases in Human Action and has given them clear and helpful defi nitions. His little essays on "eco nomics," "inflation," and "money" (in its several forms) are reason enough for owning the book. It might well be kept at your elbow as you read the original monu ment. Human Action deserves the wid est possible audience and should be made available in every form in the original bulk, in Greaves' definitions, in textbook form, in condensed versions. A close study of the text reveals that the posi tive assertions of Mises amount to about ten per cent of the entire work. The "meat," therefore, shorn of the historical and contro versial dissertations, could be printed in a book of merely a hun dred pages. Perhaps this would be a worthy second step in Greaves' excellent endeavors to make von Mises better known to the world.

The truth is unpalatable to the reigning bureaucrats in govern ment, publishing, and teaching; ,vith the result that the writers of true works are seldom listed in the bibliographies with adequate prominence. And, finally, alas, the writers of truth are seldom the most amiable and charming of stylists; they are hard to read. For such reasons as these the great summing-up work of Lud wig von Mises, Human Action, re mains shockingly unknown and unread. The book is almost a thousand pages long. Each page is filled with close-spaced lines which are filled, in turn, with long sen tences, iron constructions, unusu al words, foreign phrases, histor ical references fit for the scholar's delight, passing allusions to an cient philosophical debates, side excursions into the history of in tellectual quarrels .... And yet the book can be read, with immense profit, by a patient person who is otherwise unpre pared for any special study. The book is an exercise in logical thought, based on the small clus ter of unarguabJe assertions that form the starting polnt of classi cal economics: that man has free will, that he engages in purposive action, that the assets of the earth are unequally distributed among the territories and among the people.

* * * the Freeman VOL. 25 7 NO.3. MARCH 1975 How InflationBreeds Recession Henry Hazlitt 131 Reasons why it is best to stop inflating now and return to sound economic and fiscal policies. The Political Costs of Price Inflation Lawrence Fertig 138 Economic breakdown and loss of freedom inevitably follow monetary weakness. Tha.nk God for the Mess We're In Leonard E. Read 146 The mess is a timely warning to change course if we would avert disaster. How Rent Controls Hurt the Poor Price-fixing results in a shortage of available housing. Allan C. Brownfeld 150 Nationalizethe Power Companies? Arch Booth 154 Would you want your electricity to be delivered by the U.S. Postal Service? The Progressionof Profitability Joan Wilke 156 Profit is not added to price but is rather the reward for efficiency. "BusinessMust Make a Profit" Paul L. Poirot 159 Profit is costless, if earned. No New Urban Jerusalem BenjaminA. Rogge 161 A persuasive appeal to leave to the market the knotty problems of urban renewal.