The Sphere of Government; H. Hazlitt

His views on the proper sphere of government are principally set forth in two essays: (1\dministrative Ni hilism" (1871), and ((Government: Anarchy or Regimentation?" (1890). In the first of these essays, he beHenry Hazlitt, noted economist, author, editor, re viewer and columnist, here continues a series of nineteenth century theories on the sphere of gov ernment. f\14. gins with an unsympathetic de scription of the opponents of wide ranging state powers: ((To these opponents, the Educa tion Act is only one of a number of pieces of legislation to which they object on principle; and they include under like condemnation the Vacci nation Act, the Contagious Diseases Act, and all other sanitary Acts; all attempts on the part of the State to prevent adulteration, or to regulate injurious trades; all legislative in terference with anything that bears directly or indirectly on commerce, such as shipping, harbors, railways, roads, cab-fares, and the carriage of letters; and all attempts to promote the spread of knowledge by the es tablishment of teaching bodies ....

According to their views, not a shil ling of public money must be be stowed upon a public park or pleaSPHERE OF GOVERNMENT: THOMAS H. HUXLEY 615 sure ground; not sixpence upon the relief of starvation, or the cure of disease. Those who hold these views support them by two lines of argu ment. They enforce them deduc tively by arguing from an assumed axiom, that the State has no right to do anything but protect its sub jects from aggression. The State is simply a policeman, and its duty is neither more nor less than to pre vent robbery and murder and en force contracts .... On the other hand these views are supported a poster iori, by an induction from observa tion, which professes to show that whatever is done by a Government beyond these negative limits, is not only sure to be done badly, but to be done much worse than private en terprise would have done the same thing." Huxley declares that he is uncon vinced by these arguments, or by that ~~great negative command ment- ~Thou shalt not allow any man to interfere with the liberty of any other man.' " He goes on: ((If my next-door neighbor chooses to have his drain in such a state as to create a poisonous atmosphere, which I breathe at the risk of ty phoid and diphtheria, he restricts my just freedom to live just as much as if he went about with a pistol, threatening my life; if he is allowed to let his children go unvaccinated, he might as well be allowed to leave strychnine lozenges about in the way of mine; and if he brings them up untaught and untrained to earn their living, he is doing his best to restrict my freedom, by the burden of taxation for the support of jails and workhouses, which I have to pay."

Huxley dismisses offhand the ar gument that, ~~If the right of the State to step beyond the assigned limits is admitted at all, there is no stopping." And he blandly con cludes: ~~The Government, being nothing but the corporate reason of the community, will find out when State interference has been carried far enough." No Fixed Limits as to Extent of Government Action It is not only modern libertarians who will rub their eyes today at this argument, but the great majority who write on political affairs. It is naive to identify the politicians in office with the community, or to con clude that those who gain political powers can be safely trusted to de cide the proper limits of those pow ers. But Huxley does not hesitate to carry this assertion to its logical conclusion, and to tell us: ~~I do not see how any limit whatever can be laid down as to the extent to which, under some circumstances, the ac tion of Government may be right fully carried .... The question where to draw the line between those things with which the State ought, 616 THE FREEMAN October and those with which it ought not, to interfere, then, is one which must be left to be decided separately for each individual case."

So we are· back to ((the merits of the case" argument that Spencer had so eloquently derided-an argu ment which could be finally used to justify the totalitarian state. Huxley returned to the subject of the proper sphere of State power in two other essays, both published in 1890. The first of these was ((Natu ral Rights and Political Rights." I commend it to anyone who still takes Natural Law or Natural Rights doc trines seriousl~ Huxley regards such doctrines as the product of ((the vi cious method of a priori political speculation." Their plausibility de pends upon a confusion between two senses of the word ((right"-right as might, the ((natural right" of tigers, for example, to attack and devour men-and moral right, which is ut terly different. Huxley's essay is, in cidentally, a devastating analysis of the theories of Henry George's Progress and Poverty. But some of Huxley's own deduc tions combine truth with error. For example: ((It is a necessary condition of social existence that men should renounce some of their freedom of action; and the question of how much is one that can by no possibility be determined a priori." The first part of that sentence is almost a truism; the part after the semicolon is a content ion that, as we shall see, no freedom-loving democracy today has been willing to concede.

Anarchy or Regimentation The second 1890 essay by Huxley to which I earlier referred, ((Govern ment: Anarchy or Regimentation?" bore directly on the question of the proper province of the State. In this essay Huxley undertook to examine in turn the answer to this question of practically all the great political philosophers of modern times, up to 1890. Specific~lly men tioned and dealt with were Hobbes, Locke, Morelly, Mably, Rousseau, Von Humboldt, Dunoyer, J. S. Mill, Stirner, and Auheron Herbert. And he rejected all of them alike (with the exception of Dunoyer) for build ing their case on abstract a priori assumptions regarding a previous Ustate of nature" and a subsequent ((socialcontract." Huxley pointed out, however, that this had led them into two opposite camps: on the one hand, that espoused by Hobbes, Morelly, Mably and Rousseau, which justi fied ((Regimentation" (the descrip tion suggested by Huxley) and the absolute power of the State; and, on the other hand, ((Individualism,"

which Huxley condemned as equiv alent to anarchy. He summed up: ((Thus the whole fabric of a priori political speculation which we have had under consideration is built upon the quicksand of fictitious his1980 SPHERE OF GOVERNMENT: THOMAS H. HUXLEY 617 tory. So far as this method of estab lishing their claims is concerned, Regimentation and Individualism enforced Socialism and Anarchy are alike out of court." And what, then, is Huxley's own conclusion? One would expect him to come back once more to the con clusion of his i\dministrative Nihil ism" essay of 1871, that ~~the ques tion of where to draw the line between those things which the State ought, and those with which it ought not, to interfere .. .is one which must be left to be decided sep arately for each individual case." Perhaps he considers this conclusion implicit, but he does not draw it ex plicitly. Instead, he is content to tell us that the task which he set before himself was ~~simply a destructive criticism of a priori political philos ophy, whether regimental or indi vidualistic"; and if he has done this successfully, he implies, he has done all that a reader is entitled to ask of one essay.

He goes on to declare: ~~The politi cal problem of problems is how to deal with overpopulation, and it faces us on all sides." But whether or not this is true, or seemed true at the time he wrote it, it is irrelevant to the problem-the proper province of government-that his essay started out to discuss. No matter what the ~~problem of problems" is, the question before him was who shall have the power to decide it. Now let us ask whether Huxley did in fact prove that there is no room for ~~a priori assumptions" or deductive reasoning in political phi losophy. It is quite true that Locke's as sumptions, for example, do seem to rest in part on fictitious history. Huxley's sarcasm makes the most of this: ~~To listen to Locke, one would imagine that a general meeting of men living in the state of nature having been called to consider the ~defects' of their condition, and somebody being voted to the tree (in the presumable absence of chairs), this earliest example of a constitu ent assembly resolved to form a gov ernmental company, with strictly limited liability, for the purpose of defending liberty and property," and so forth.

Individualism Attacked All this is good fun, but it does not prove that Locke was wrong in as suming that ~~no one ought to harm another in his life, liberty, or posses sions"; that it is the province of gov ernment to ensure this state of af fairs, and that this was a sufficient task to give anyone agency the power to carry out. Huxley certainly carried his at tack on ~~Individualism" and ~~Liber alism" too far. ~~Liberalism," he de clared, ~~tended to the adoption of Locke's definition of the limits of 618 THE FREEMAN October State action, and to consider persis tence in letting alone as a definition of the whole duty of a statesman." (My italics.) I can think of no eminent Liberal of the nineteenth century, and cer tainly none holding political office, who ever propounded such a view of his duties as that laid down in· the clause I have italicized. Liberals de precated the piling up of legal pro hibitions and compulsions, burden some taxation, government efforts to redistribute wealth and income, and other specific interventions in economic life, but they believed in enforcing a fundamental framework of law to protect their citizens against fraud, theft, and violence, internal or external. This in itself, if done well, is a tremendous assign ment.

Today it is not done well any where; because-arguing from ((the merits of the case"-too many other assignments are loaded onto the State, designed to save at least some of us all effort and risk. Once we as sume that it is a legitimate function of the state to redistribute income, for example, we practically guaran tee that the majority of politicians running for office will be charlatans and demagogues, outpromising each other concerning the largess they can provide to the nonproductive part of the population at the ex pense of the productive. To return to Huxley's argument: No doubt some of the leading politi cal philosophers did base their theories on fictitious history, or on basic assumptions that were not jus tified. But Huxley seems to reject all ((aprioristic" thinking in· politics, which would mean that he rejected any attempt in advance to put any constitutional limits whatever on the sphere and power of the State. He apparently would have been satis fied with a constitution which read, simply: ((The government may pass and enforce any law it sees fit, guided only by what it regards as the merits of the individual case; and no part of any citizen's freedom or property shall be respected if a majority of 51 percent or more de cide otherwise."

In his thinking in the physical sci ences Huxley was a professed em piricist, and suspicious of all mere deduction. Nevertheless, in his book on Hume, we find him writing with approval: u •••[T]he form of the crest of every wave that breaks, wind driven, on the sea-shore, and the di rection of every particle of foam that flies before the gale, are the exact effects of definite causes; and, as such, must be capable of being de termined, deductively, from the laws of motion and the properties of air and water."l The scientific belief in the law of IHume. Ch. VI, "Propositions Concerning Necessary Truths."

1980 SPHERE OF GOVERNMENT: THOMAS H. HUXLEY 619 universal causation is based on something more than frequent ob servance of it in particular cases, plus no certain knowledge of con trary cases. The concept of universal causation is built into our thinking. We can hardly conceive of an effect without a cause. In any case, its prior assumption is necessary for all rational deduction and all rational action. Established Principles of Law to Prevent Arbitrary Abuse Perhaps our basic political, legal or moral principles can never enjoy the same type of definitude and cer tainty as the laws of physics. But the discovery and adoption of such basic principles seem no less neces sary as guides in our political, legal, and moral life than the laws of phys ics in our physical scientific reason ing. We do not leave it to an individ ual judge, for example, to decide the punishment for each case of fraud, theft, assault or murder--or to de cide what actions he is entitled to punish at all-simply in accordance with his own judgment of the indi vidual iniquity of each act. The law has already sought to define and categorize each type of offense and to prescribe minimum and maxi mum penalties. The principles and definitions of law have been worked out over the centuries, by careful reasoning and respect for precedent, precisely to limit or prevent any capricious or arbitrary exercise of po lice or judicial power.

The same thing has happened in the evolution of constitutional law. In the United States, neither a city, a state, nor our federal government can enact or enforce any law it sees fit, guided only by ((the merits of the individual case." The Constitution, adopted in 1787, assigned the Con gress, the President, and the judici ary only enumerated powers. And then, two years later, to nail things down, a Bill of Rights was adopted, beginning with the First Amend ment: ((Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of reli gion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble ..." And so on through nine other amendments. Huxley should have remembered that. And he should have remem bered, also, that though not all mod ern democratic governments have written constitutions, and England still does not, the English Constitu tion was even in his own day--one might say especially in his own day-a very real and unmistakable protection against government ar bitrariness or tyranny. No less than our own it protected the citizen's freedom of speech, freedom from ar bitrary arrest, freedom of religion, and freedom of association.

The English Constitution exists 620 THE FREEMAN October in no single document. It is made up of Magna Carta, the Petition of Right act, the Habeas Corpus act, the Bill of Rights and the Act of Set tlement. But in addition to all these, it consists of innumerable statutes, a mass of custom and convention, hundreds of judicial decisions and precedents, and even, as the Ency clopedia Britannica has suggested, of ((textbooks, lawbooks, the writ ings of historians and political theorists, the biographies and auto biographies of statesmen," and so on. IfHuxley had remembered all this, he would not so disdainfully have dismissed all the proposals of the older political philosophers as ((mere apriorism." That all political power tends to be abused, and that abso lute power is certain to be abused, The Foundation of Laws might reasonably have been sus pected in advance. But even so it is no mere a priori conclusion. It has been forced on us by bitter and end lessly repeated experience.

Exactly where the boundaries of State power should be drawn, is one of the two great problems to which this series of articles is addressed, and which we have still to try to solve. But that they must be drawn by constitutional limitation some where, and unmistakably, is one conclusion no longer open to debate. What we have discovered, rather, is that in not a single country today have the existing constitutional limits on government power and in terference in the lives of the citizens proved sufficient to prevent untold mischief. i IDEAS ON LIBERTY LET the bar proclaim llthe laws, the rights, the generous plan of power" delivered from remote antiquity, inform the world of the mighty strug gles and numberless sacrifices made by our ancestors in defense of free dom. Let it be known that British liberties are not the grants of princes or parliaments but original rights, conditions of original contracts, co equal with prerogative and coeval with government; that many of our rights are inherent and essential. ... Let them search for the foundations of ... laws and government in the frame of human nature, in the consti tution of the intellectual and moral world. There let us see that truth, liberty, justice, and benevolence are its everlasting basis; and if these could be removed, the superstructure is overthrown of course.

JOHN ADAMS, 1765 Robert R. Hoyt MANY believe that time has run out on America, that the leading wave of history has begun to pass us by. Drawing analogies between the cur rent state of America and the de clining phases of previous cultures, these fatalists believe that we are destined to live out some theory of inevitable cycles or repetitions in history. They locate somewhere in our past a point at which America reached its pinnacle and began its decline. America's fate, however, has not been sealed by any historical imperative. Men make history through creating,· witnessing, and recording significant deeds and events. History has not abandoned America; on the contrary, AmeriMr. Hoyt of St. Petersburg, Florida, is a self-employed businessman and an adjunct professor of English at Hillsborough Community College. cans have abandoned their place in history. At one time, our forebears looked almost exclusi vely to the past for guidance. Mythical events that had happened in earlier times provided unchanging paradigms for individ ual and social actions. Having lim ited knowledge of the world and their place in it, these ancestors did not seek to study or understand his tory. Instead, they followed what they felt were sacred ways of think ing and acting. In contrast, one of the hallmarks of American thought is our rejection of such deterministic views of historical precedence.