Book Reviews

In O'Rourke's words, liberals" ... are people I had been accustomed to thinking of as daffy, not villainous. Getting their toes caught in sandal straps, bumping their heads on wind chimes-how much trouble could they cause, even in a full blown cultural-diversity frenzy? (I mean if Euro peans didn't discover North America, how'd we all get here?)" E J. O'Rourke then goes on to charge that every iniquity reported in his book-and by my random count there's an average of eight iniquities per page or more than 2,000 in the book-is traceable to bad thinking or bad government, to intellectu alism unhinged-to modern liberalism. Liberals, he points out, are the gang of brain washers in the media, pulpits, classrooms, court rooms, legislatures, and elsewhere, those bad boys 365 and naughty girls in our midst who are busily mak ing trouble by doing good for everybody including, ironically, themselves. They frequently make trou ble by doing good under the rubric of "freedom"

or "democracy," by which they secretly mean bul lying, arm-twisting, state coercion. And they do so ever so angel-like, so sanctimoniously (sanctimo niousness is half their creed), that they get away with murder. To quote the author: "Liberals want the free dom to put anything into their mouths, to say bad words and to expose their private parts in art museums. That liberals aren't enamored of real freedom may have something to do with responsi bility-that cumbersome backpack which all free men have to lug on life's aerobic nature hike. The second item in the liberal creed, after self-righ teousness, is unaccountability. Liberals have invented whole college majors-psychology, soci ology, women's studies-to prove that nothing is anybody's fault." Liberals, further holds the author, have an infantile view of the world. He writes: "At the core of liberalism is the spoiled child-miserable, as all spoiled children are, unsatisfied, demanding, ill disciplined, despotic and useless. Liberalism is a philosophy of sniveling brats."

Yes, E J. O'Rourke is himself sometimes nasty, raunchy, and given to four-letter words, but at least he's no hypocrite, no two-faced Janus. He's simply without pretension, without dissembling. At times he gets emotional at the tumbling-down of the Berlin Wall or at the liberation of Kuwait City. But he is funny. He's out to save neither the world nor fools from their own foolishness. He's calling a spade a spade, skewering liberals on their own hook, and having a lot of fun doing it. Take his treatment of President Jimmy Carter and his wife Rosalynn. (He also treats, among oth ers, Dr. Ruth, Lee Iacocca, and the Kennedys). Not long ago the Carters wrote a book, Every thingto Gain, a book of incredible blandness and do-gooding naivete, a book nonetheless glorified in The New York Times Book Reviewas an "auto biography that is part confession, part pep talk and part handbook for activism ... an inspiring account of the creation of a meaningful life."

Meaningful? I wonder. E J. O'Rourke reports this guileless Rosalynn quotation in Everythingto Gain that gives the reader a double take: "I have worked with the problems of the mentally afflicted 366 THE FREEMAN • SEPTEMBER 1992 for years, ever since I first became aware of the needs while campaigning for Jimmy for Gover nor." Or this one: "When I was young and in high school, during World War II, I thought Hirohito was the cruelest man in the world next to Hitler. I blamed the whole Pacific conflict on him. Years later ... we went to Tokyo and called on a sweet little elderly man, who raised flowers in his hothouse at the palace .... This was Emperor Hirohito-as far removed from my conception of him as he possibly could be." So the Carters ramble on in what ~ 1. O'Rourke tags "puerile and ignorant prose," into which he occasionally interjects his two cents. Can ~ 1. O'Rourke be victimizing the Carters, liberals par excellence? He points out that liberals are fond of victimsand seek them everywhere. Vic timology is their raisond'etre. Minorities are their happy hunting ground. (Women, in the majority, are somehow declared to be a minority.Neat trick.) And the more victimized the better -the best vic tims being too ignorant, rattled or addled to chal lenge their liberal benefactors, who proceed to vic timize their victims further (not unlike that hit-and-run driver who sees his victimstagger to his feet and backs up to hit him again). D Dr. Peterson, an adjunct scholar at the Heritage Foun dation and the Ludwig von Mises Institute, is the Lundy Professor of Business Philosophy at Campbell Univer sity, Buies Creek, North Carolina.

THE VIRTUEOF PRUDENCE by Douglas J. Den Uyl Peter Lang Publisher, New York -1991 - 340pages - $64.00. Reviewedby TiborR. Machan I f there is one personal moral virtue that gives support not only to our commercial activities and the profession of business, but also to the economic system of capitalism, it is the virtue of prudence. As we ordinarily think of it, prudence means caring about one's wellbeing, but there is a lot more to it than that. For one thing, in the history of human reflection about ethics and morality an interesting develop ment has been the decline of prudence as a morally significant item. In the works of modem ethicists, being prudent is usually contrasted with being moral or ethical. For the Greeks, prudence was an important element of the moral life; whereas for moderns, it is virtually irrelevant to morality. One result is that almost no important ethicist in our time believes that commerce, business, and capitalism are morally defensible. At most, these parts of human community life provide us with material wealth, so perhaps, as the early defenders of capitalism believed, it is a matter of "private vice, public benefit." That is, we tolerate acting prudently simply so as to gain overall prosperity for our societies.

Professor Den Uyl's book is a brilliant, unparal leled exploration of the details of the story I have barely hinted at. He traces its numerous intellectu al elements; he analyzes all of them carefully; he then shows how mistaken moral and political philosophers have been to abandon concern for prudence. Finally, he develops the case for the reality and vital necessity of this virtue in modem life. In his concluding sections, Professor Den Uyl shows us that not only the virtue of prudence but all the moral virtues require, for their exercise in human community life, the protection of the rights to life, liberty and property. He gives us a brief but very powerful outline of the argument advanced by some other philosophers of the free society, namely, that it is only in the fully free society that the moral or ethical nature of human living is fully honored. D Tibor Machan is a visiting professor at the United States Military Academy, West Point. His most recent book is Capitalism and Individualism: Reframing the Argu ment for the Free Society (St. Martin's Press, 1990).

FREEDOM:FREEDOMIN THE MAKING OF WESTERNCULTURE by Orlando Patterson Basic Books, 10 East 53rd Street, New York, NY 10022 1991 - 487 pages - $29.95cloth Reviewedby Doug Bandow F reedom "is the one value that many people seem prepared to die for," writes sociolo gist Orlando Patterson, author of Free dom: Freedomin the Making of Western Culture. "It is the catchword of every politician, the secular gospel of our economic, 'free enterprise' system, and the foundation of all our cultural activities." With the collapse of the Soviet V nion, we are seeing most of the former Communist nations moving toward both economic and politicalliber ty. Many of the same trends are evident in a num ber of newly industrializing countries, such as South Korea and Taiwan, as well as in impover ished Third World nations. Even though an authoritarian gerontocracy has been able to hang on to power in Beijing,the Chinese people's yearn ing for freedom is evident. "There is now hardly a country whose leaders, however dubiously,do not claim that they are pursuing the ideal," observes Patterson. Yet,oddly,the V.S. seems to be moving in the opposite direction, with an ever-expanding state.

What makes these divergent trends so ironic is that the most important contribution of Western culture has probably been its emphasis on liberty. Observes Patterson, "No one would deny that today freedom stands as the supreme value of the Western world." However, this is not, at least until recently, the case in Africa and the East. In these nations, writes Patterson, "other values were, or are, of far greater importance to them values such as the pursuit of glory, honor, and power for oneself or one's family . . . the list is endless. But almost never, outside the context of Western culture and its influence, has it included freedom." Freedom, the first of two planned volumes, is Patterson's attempt to explain why one culture val ued liberty while so many others did not. His effort is of particular interest today, as freedom-with the concomitant protection of democratic elec toral processes, economic opportunity, and human rights-is finally advancing in Africa, Asia, and the onetime Soviet empire. Why has it taken so much longer in these areas?

Patterson seeks to answer this question, but his argument and ample research are undermined by his curious three-part definition of freedom. One variant is most clearly identified with the Anglo, and American, political tradition: "personal free dom" from coercion by the state. It is "at its most elementary," writes Patterson, "the sense that one, on the one hand, is not being coerced or restrained by another person in doing something desired and, on the other hand, the conviction that one can do as one pleases within the limits of other persons' desire to do the same." BOOKS 367 Quite different is Patterson's second form of freedom: "sovereignal," that is, "the power to act as one pleases, regardless of the wishes of others." This form of liberty is really authoritarianism-the right of a slaveholder or political leader, for instance, to operate without restraint. Finally,Pat terson treats separately "civicfreedom," which he defines as "the capacity of adult members of a community to participate in its life and gover nance." Although civic freedom implies some democratic guarantees, it may be matched with economic and personal tyranny.

Patterson argues that these often contradictory concepts "are the three constitutive elements of the uniquely Western chord of freedom." His basic thesis is that all three developed in response to the institution of slavery."Freedom began its career as a socialvalue in the desperate yearning of the slave to negate what, for him or her, and for nonslaves, was a peculiarly inhuman condition," he contends. Although others have made this argument before, Patterson says that they underestimated the long term importance of freedom's genesis in slavery, since more than a simple change in technical legal status was at stake: "the idea of freedom has never been divorced from this, its primordial, servile source." His argument is obviously controversial and provocative. In brief, Patterson contends that the fear of slavery first created a real love of personal freedom among women, who were most at risk of enslavement and who could yearn for emancipa tion because their honor would not have been destroyed by a period of enslavement. Gradually the demand for male slaves increased, leading to "a slow masculation" of slavery, but men's desire for glory and honor long left no room for "any masculation of the expression of freedom."

Men were, however, more interested in the oth er strands of freedom. Civicfreedom, for instance, developed in Greece as part of what Patterson calls "the struggle between the free small farmers and the landowning elite." Slavery played a deci sive role in this battle, in Patterson's view,because small producers envied the larger slaveholders and demanded civicequality, which, in Patterson's lex icon, equals liberty. He writes: "men, for the first time, began to take freedom seriously.In doing so, however, tlley transferred it from the individual personal domain of language to the public realm." Lastly, "sovereignal" freedom naturally reflect368 THE FREEMAN • SEPTEMBER 1992 ed the rights of the slave owner. This philosophy later grew in its larger sense-"the Homeric notion of the free community" -particularly in response to the Persian and Peloponnesian Wars. Free came to mean cultural imperialism, the supe riority of Greeks as a collective unit, for instance.

Alas, Patterson's conclusions exceed his evi dence. The most serious problem is his decision to lump together personal freedom, political equality ("civic freedom"), and state imperialism ("sovereignal freedom") in discussing the evolu tion of "freedom." In fact, what we see is not the grand march of triune liberty,as Patterson treats it, but rather, a bitter and confusing struggle between individual and state that continues to this day. Moreover, while the existence of such a dramat ic counterpoint to liberty as slavery undoubtedly helped foster an appreciation of what it means to be free, a multitude of other factors were also obvi ously at work-and presumably account for why other slave societies never developed a similar appreciation of freedom. Indeed, Patterson him self acknowledges that slavery was a universal institution. But the apparent discrepancy, he says, can be explained: "while the idea of freedom was certainly engendered wherever slavery existed, it never came to term. People everywhere, except in the ancient West, resisted its gestation and institu tionalization." He goes on to argue that some of the cultural aspects surrounding slavery developed differently in non-Western parts of the world; for instance, owners in Africa would promise some participation in the community,rather than release from bondage, as a reward for good service. Yet this raises more questions than it answers. For instance, if slavery was such a determining factor, why did both masters and slaves in different lands react so differently to the same institution?

Patterson goes on to track his three variants of liberty through Roman times (in which he finds slavery having a different, but still important, impact), the early Christian era, and Medieval Europe. One of his more important points is how the Christian concept of spiritual equality under mined the institution of slavery,creating "a major crisisfor the entire system" as early as A.D. 700. However, he unsatisfactorily tries to force Christian doctrine, as expounded by the Apostle Paul, into his framework, arguing that there is "a shift in emphasis from personal freedom in Gala tians to sovereignal freedom in Romans." Here again, Patterson seems to be subsuming very dif ferent philosophical and theological concepts under the single heading of "freedom," a particu larly dangerous undertaking since much of Chris tian doctrine is concerned with spiritual liberty, a concept with no secular equivalent.

But Patterson's most important argument remains the relationship of slavery to liberty. The history of slavery as "the handmaiden" of free dom, writes Patterson, "has bruited in the open what we cannot stand to hear, that inhering in the good which we defend with our lives is often the very evil we most abhor." Interestingly, Patterson seems profoundly ambivalent about this most fun damental of Western values, on which he has writ ten a 487-page book. "At its best, the valorization of personal liberty is the noblest achievement of Western civilization," he says. But personal free dom, in his view, can be "evil and socially corro sive, inducing selfishness, alienation, the celebra tion of greed, and the dehumanizing disregard for the 'losers.'" Freedomis a valuable work, packed with infor mation and thoughtful analysis. Some of Patter son's insights about the historical development of liberty are truly profound. Yet his overemphasis on the role of slavery and his muddling of the def inition of freedom make the volume frustrating to read. One wishes that he had better understood what liberty really meant before he wrote the book. 0 Doug Bandow is a Senior Fellow at the Cato Institute and the author of The Politics of Plunder: Misgovern ment in Washington.