Book Reviews

Leo Strauss of the University of Chicago set innumerable students to thinking about their political institutions. Strauss's concern was for a "spirit" that might be described as "se renity" or "sublime sobriety." He talked of "piety" as the "humble wonder at mystery." The good citizen, in Strauss's view, should de dicate himself to "piety and service. " Tossing the word "service" into the argu ment must lead to some confusion. The entre preneur, as Adam Smith insisted, was more often than not a serviceable entity to all of hu manity even when he was dominated by selfish aims. George Nash, who contributes an introduc tion to Senator East's book, speaks of East's desire to recall American conservatives to their religious roots. Hence the common denomi nator· of picking a religiously motivated six, and a fellow traveler (Mises), for special study. What bothers me about the selection of the seven is that they were not the pioneers of the American conservative movement. I caught up with the seven after an early contact with Henry Hazlitt, Max Eastman, Don Levine, Frank Chodorov, Whittaker Chambers, Leonard Read, Isabel Paterson, Rose Wilder Lane, Ayn Rand, Garet Garrett, Claude Robinson, and Murray Rothbard. The list is long, and could be made longer.

Nash says of East that he would be the first to acknowledge that his seven "were not the only architects of the conservative rena scence." East, says Nash, favored his seven because they "did the most to infuse American conservatism with intellectual substance and coherence-who made it, in short, a formi dable movement of ideas. ' , One does not cavil with the statement that Willmoore Kendall, Frank Meyer, and the rest of the seven had "substance" and "coher ence. " But to imply that Henry Hazlitt, for in stance, had less to do with infusing the conser vativemovement with substance and coherence than Kendall or Meyer is simply to create a one-sided impression. Hazlitt's Economics in One Lesson, a perennial best-seller, is certainly full of substance and reads with a beautiful co herence. I like to give pioneers their special due. I like to recall that Don Levine's Plain Talk maga zine printed a map of the Russian Gulag long before Solzhenitsyn became a household word.

1 like to remember the work of William Henry Chamberlin in exposing the man-made famine of 1930 in Stalin's Russia. He certainly changed minds about Communism. American conservatism has had many roots, some of them religious, some not. Even atheists (Max Eastman and Ayn Rand) have contributed to it. o COGS IN THE WHEEL: THE FORMATION OF SOVIET MAN by Mikhail Heller Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., 400 Hahn Road, Westminster, MD 21157 1988 •293 pp., $22.95 cloth. Reviewed by Richard M. Ebeling A sentiment commonly heard in recent discussions concerning future Soviet American relations is that conflict and tension are inevitable unless these two "great nations" are able to "understand" one another. The presumption is that ignorance breeds fear and war, while knowledge creates a bond of mutual respect and peaceful relationships. It is certainly true that, even in the new era of glasnost in Gorbachev's Russia, the people of the Soviet Union are still limited in the in formation and ideas they are permitted to re ceive from the West. In the West, on the other hand, the situation is different. The information available about the Soviet system is vast, but often what gets filtered through the news media is a Soviet Russia seen through rose-colored glasses: they are really just like us, only dif ferent. This is supposed to mean that the So viets really want the same things we in the West desire-peace, prosperity, justice; it's just that they sometimes use methods that seem a bit brutal by our more sensitive Western stan dards. If only we could humanize them a little....

Mikhail Heller's recent book, Cogs in the Wheel: The Formation of Soviet Man, force fully argues that an understanding of the Soviet Union requires an appreciation that, from the inception of the Soviet State in 1917, not only the means chosen were different from those in the West, but also the ideological ends for which the power of government has been ap plied are different. Nationalization of the means of production by Lenin and the Bol sheviks was a tool for a specific purpose: to control all aspects of the social and economic environment so as to create the conditions nec essary to make over human nature and produce a new Soviet or Communist Man. Believing, as good Marxists do, that man is a product of his material environment, the Rus sian Communists had a vision of a new human being: selfless in character, collectivist in ori entation, boundless in his love of labor for the common good, and heroic in his defense of the revolutionary cause. But what Lenin and the Bolsheviks found after the Revolution was a Russian people imbued with the same "bour geois" traits as everyone else: individuals pri marily looking out for number one, more inter ested in improving the economic conditions of their immediate family, reluctant to work ex cept for incentives and rewards for the labor to be performed, and generally disinterested in making sacrifices for a world revolution.

To achieve their goal, therefore, Professor Heller explains, the Communist Party pro ceeded to destroy all the cultural and economic institutional structures that surrounded and pro tected the Russian people. As the author ex presses it, the Soviet authorities began a pro cess to "infantilize" every Russian, i.e., to make every Russian completely dependent upon the Soviet State, and, therefore, moldable in a social cast constructed by the Party elite. No comer in the society would be left in which the individual could hide and protect any perOTHER BOOKS 503 sonal qualities and characteristics undesigned by the State. In one of the most intriguing chapters, Pro fessor Heller argues that the introduction of the "Five Year Plan" served as an instrument en abling the Party to control the very concept and boundaries of time. All conceptions of tem poral horizons, beginnings and endings, goals and intermediary points, were defined in terms of the clock of the plan. The Party could accel erate time (by meeting the plan's goals ahead of schedule), apportion time (by subdividing the plan into weekly, monthly, or yearly produc tion quota periods), and change time (by short ening or lengthening the plan's horizon). By manipulating time and the plans within it, the Party could perform miracles before the eyes of "the masses"; by juggling the numbers and massaging the facts of production, the Party could make it appear as though the laws of na ture were subordinate to it.

In the new social order, the individual could have no existence outside of the State-no plans, no identity, no sense of self other than his place as an assigned cog in "the people's" machine. After explaining the goals and strategies for making the new Soviet Man, Professor Heller methodically describes the techniques: the in troduction of fear through an omnipresent and omniscient secret police; the control of labor through internal passports and the State as mo nopoly employer; the breeding of guilt through corruption, as the black market became a pri mary avenue for survival; the control of minds through an educational system that intrudes beyond the classroom to the family itself; the planning of culture via Party domination of lit erature and art; and the manipulation of lan guage and, therefore, thought by a constant bombardment of slogans, phrases, and images that make it difficult to think of words or ·con cepts other than in terms of the meanings be stowed upon them by Party ideology.

In his earlier work, Utopia in Power (co-au thored with Aleksandr M. Nekrich), Heller ex haustively and impressively traced the history of the Soviet Union. Now, in Cogs in the Wheel, he helps complete that picture with a portrait of the cultural and human order Soviet power has produced. Through it, we see that 504 THE FREEMAN. DECEMBER 1988 the Soviets are not the same as we are. Those who rule in the Soviet Union have a design dif ferent from the Western ideals of a free society. While 70 years of Marxist rule may not have replaced human nature with a new Soviet Man, it has influenced the minds of the Russian people. This is seen even in those most recent documentaries on Soviet life in which Western camera crews are approached by ordinary Rus sians on the street and asked, "Who has per mitted this?" What is not explicitly permitted is strictly forbidden. For many Russians, "freedom" only means knowing the differ ence. And the Party's telling people that they can now have more freedom of expression and action under glasnost does not imply that the words will be immediately translated into Western meanings in the minds of the Russian populace. D Professor Ebeling holds the Ludwig von Mises Chair in Economics at Hillsdale College.

CHANGING COURSE: CIVIL RIGHTS AT THE CROSSROADS by Clint Bolick Transaction Books, Rutgers University, New Brunswick, New Jersey 08903 • 1988· 152 pp., $24.95 cloth. Reviewed by Carl Helstrom T he civil rights movement in the United States has undergone radical changes in the past 20 years. Following the death of Martin Luther King, the movement deteriorated into a loose-knit faction that claims to advance the ideas of earlier leaders. In reality, the movement has swung full circle to work against the original design. Clint Bolick, who has served as counsel in several leading civil rights cases, has written a book which could go a long way toward bringing the civil rights movement back on course. The book has two parts. The first con tains a brief, yet penetrating, history of civil rights in America. In the second part, Bolick offers his program for re-establishing civil rights based upon the principles of liberty, property, and equality before the law.

Throughout the book, Bolick's analysis is inci sive and his writing is clear. Eighteenth-and nineteenth-century civil rights leaders drew heavily upon the ideas of John Locke. Locke wrote that all people have a right to life and property, including property in themselves, and logically deduced the necessity of equal opportunity before the law. He, in ef fect, set the justification for a free society upon two planes: (1) the ethical notion of the indi vidual's right to property and freedom of choice and (2) the political view of representa tive government to protect those rights. This classical liberal concept of equal rights, based upon the right to life and property, made it impossible for slavery to continue unchal lenged. The stage was set for the abolition movement. Organized opposition to slavery in America had begun in the late 1600s, especially in New England and among the Quakers. The Revolu tionary leaders documented their support for civil rights in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution of the United States. Yet they did not eliminate the institution of slavery which was contrary to all they believed and fought to attain.

Bolick details the abolitionists' efforts to eradicate slavery and to educate the public in the.classical liberal ideas which form the basis of civil rights. His analysis of this important period in civil rights history is concise and en lightening. Early nineteenth-century abolitionists pro moted several methods of education and manu mission with limited success. William Lloyd Garrison became their leader, publishing his arguments in The Liberator and participating in the formation of the American Anti-Slavery So ciety. Regardless of method, the typical aboli tionist's stand was upon his or her faith that all persons are created equal. The debate over slavery truly became a battle with lines drawn on moral absolutes. Resorting to political means, abolitionists founded the Liberty Party in 1839. They met with difficulty because of their limited constitu ency and voting restrictions on blacks and, in 1848, many joined with the Free Sailers. By 1860, the political forum for the abolitionists had expanded and strengthened. The result was the Republican Party with Abraham Lincoln as its candidate.

The American Civil War, for all its blood shed and destruction, ensured that equal rights for all citizens would be incorporated into the law of the land. Slavery was abolished offi cially in 1865 by the Thirteenth Amendment. Congress also enacted the Freedmen Acts to as sist former slaves. The Civil Rights Acts of 1866 and 1871, according to Bolick, held to the original interpretation of civil rights for protec tion on the Federal and state levels. The Four teenth Amendment banned discrimination by states; the Fifteenth Amendment ensured voting rights regardless of "race, color, or previous condition of servitude." These Amendments sought to remedy inadequacies in the law and to counter the Black Codes formulated in the South to subjugate the freed slaves after the war. Stifled on one front, white racists responded by erecting economic barriers to black prog ress. The Supreme Court sanctioned this ap proach by taking a narrow view of civil rights in the famous Slaughter-House Cases. Various states soon contrived Jim Crow laws modeled after the earlier Black Codes.

The intellectual descendants of the original civil rights leaders were subsequently led by Booker T. Washington. Washington stressed the idea of black self-help, and asked only that the rights of Negroes be construed in the con text of equality before the law. His critics, no tably W. E. B. DuBois and Marcus Garvey, did not like what they considered his placation of white supremacists. Despite this infighting, the efforts of civil rights leaders succeeded in opening new opportunities for black Americans and culminated in the creation of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (N.A.A.C.P.) in 1909, formed ex pressly to secure equal rights for blacks. The years of the World Wars and the Great Depression brought new challenges for the civil rights movement. Other minorities entered into civil rights controversies, most notably the Jap anese in the 1944 case of Korematsu v. United States, which supported the incarceration of Japanese-Americans during Wodd War II. This case reaffirmed the "reasonableness" criterion OTHER BOOKS 505 established in 1896 by Plessy v. Ferguson, which had sanctioned "separate but equal"

laws. The states or federal government now could discriminate in the "public interest." In other words, the rights of United States citizens were conditional-determined by the partiality of the legislature and the courts. Legal pater nalism was accepted and institutionalized. The catchword of the twentieth century be came "segregation," and two distinctive movements for black civil rights emerged. The traditional ideas were taken up by Martin Luther King and the N.A.A.C.P. Meanwhile, another pressure group developed, picking up some of the old separatist ideas advanced by Marcus Garvey in the last century. Character ized by notions of class conflict, collectivism, and forced economic reallocation, this new sep aratism was a militant and racist thorn in the side of equal opportunity. Nonetheless, the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Twenty-fourth Amendment, and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, along with other changes in the 1960s, bolstered the legal and social foundations of civil rights.

Since the 1960s, however, we have wit nessed a major alteration in the civil rights movement. Bolick calls the dramatic deviation a "revision" because it borrowed from the old school on the surface, but actually adopted the new separatist approach. The vocal new order calls for equality in result, collective identifica tion, and a questionable perception of "rights" that has little or no relationship to individuals' rights. Tbis is the status of the movement today. The second part of the book addresses the contemporary civil rights scene and lays out a compelling plan for the future. Particularly noteworthy is Bolick's chapter on "The Neces sity of Judicial Action," which contains his theories for returning to the original interpreta tion of equal rights in the courts. This chapter is especially interesting in light of recent contro versies surrounding the Supreme Court that have brought out new questions as to the proper role and impartiality of that court.

On three points, however, I must disagree with the author. First, he advocates "Economic Liberty Acts" to be passed by legislatures on the state and Federal levels. These acts suppos506 THE FREEMAN. DECEMBER 1988 edly would promote entrepreneurship by pro hibiting government intervention into economic activity. Second, he believes that inner-city areas should be set aside as "enterprise zones," a kind of capsulated capitalism. Third, he endorses a "voucher system" for parents to opt out of public schools and tax credits for supporters of children in private schools. These three suggestions are political remedies subject to the whim and caprice of politicians, and beg the question of truly principled action. On the whole, however, I cannot speak too highly of this book. If you read between the lines, you realize that what we see and hear today is not the legacy of Dr. King. The loud and intimidating antics of some of today's civil rights leaders may overshadow this fact, but Bolick's message is clear when he concludes that "The challenge is for whites to learn the lessons of the past two decades; for blacks, to demand and exploit the opportunities that America's commitment to civil rights is in tended to guarantee; and for all Americans, to be faithful to the ideals upon which this na tion's claim to greatness is based." 0 Mr. Helstrom is a member of the staff of The Foundation for Economic Education.

CHRISTMAS 1988 GIFT SUBSCRIPTIONS Checking your last-minute holiday gift list? There is still time to give a year of THE FREEMAN and NOTES FROM FEE to friends, business associates, teachers, students, employees, clergymen, libraries-whomever you choose. Each subscription will begin with an attractive gift card, mailed in time for Christmas. The price is only $10.00 per name. Call or write to us today! The Foundation 'or Econo.ic Education Irvington-on-Hudson, New York 10533 Telephone: (914) 591-7230 507 INDEX THE FREEMAN VOLUME 38 JANUARY-DECEMBER 1988 c BRAZIL Hyperinflation: lessons from South America (Swanson) 1:7-10 Hyperinflation threatens Brazil (Reed) 1:4-6 BREWER, Michael "Blat": corruption in eastern Europe. 3:86-89 BRIGHT, John: voice of Victorian liberalism (Elliott) 8:304-307 BRINGING the pirates to bay (McGath) 11:454-456 BROADCASTING, property rights and the first amendment (GTAnderson) 11:443-447 BUMPER-STICKER economics (Bohanon & Van Cott) 7:267-268 BUREAUCRACY Burden of bureaucracy (Bradford) 7:276-277 Monitor: America's socialized shipwreck (Gentile) 9:346-349 BURKE, Ruth The poor among us. 3:97-98 AUSTRALIA "New socialism" (JKWilliams) 2:69-72 AYAU, Manuel F. & Cole, Julio Perestroika: can it work? 12:494-495 B A NOTE: In page references, the number preceding the colon designates the month, those following refer to pages. All articles have at least three entries-author, title, and subject-except in a few cases when the title clearly indicates the subject. The short "Perspective" items are listed under that category and cross-indexed to author. Books reviewed are listed alphabetically by their author(s) on page 512; the names of their reviewers are included in the master index.