Book Reviews

BOOKS The Great Philanthropists and the Problem of "Donor Intent" by Martin Morse Wooster Capital Research Center • 1998 • 198 pages • $15.00 Reviewed by George C. Leef A ccording to a book titled The Right Guide and its companion volume, The Left Guide, funding for the various organizations that promote the expansion of government is between three and four times as great as the funding for the organizations that seek to pro tect freedom, private property, and limited government. The principal reason for this lamentable situation is that several huge foun dations that were built on the fortunes of men who were staunch laissez-faire advocates have been turned into cash cows for statist advocacy, among them the Ford, Rockefeller, and MacArthur foundations. The Great Philanthropists examines the problem of the subversion of the wishes of individuals who create vast wealth and foun dations to disburse that wealth after their deaths. The villains of the piece are the "pro fessional" and almost invariably statist foun dation managers who think that they know how to use the fortunes amassed by entrepre neurs to refashion society and have no qualms whatsoever about employing the funds in ways the donor would not have approved.

Wooster introduces us, for example, to William H. Allen, one of the earliest of these types, who denounced the "dead hand" of donor intentions and argued that trustees should be free to use foundation money for any purpose they thought worthy 20 years after the donor's death. (In truth, many don't see why they should have to wait 20 minutes.) The philosophy and objectives of "profession als" like Allen usually differ markedly from those of the wealth creators, yet in case after case, they succeeded in taking control of the 53 foundations of the great capitalists. The book explains how it happened. Consider John D. Rockefeller, creator of Standard Oil. During his lifetime, he made sure that his charitable giving did not promote dependency or waste. But people were con stantly hounding him for money, and he was persuaded that he could insulate himself from that hounding by setting up a foundation and letting others handle the giving away of his money; this was "wholesale" rather than "retail" philanthropy. Within one year of the establishment of the Rockefeller Foundation in 1913, Wooster writes, "many foundation trustees and employees were looking for ways to exclude Rockefeller from the foundation's affairs." They would succeed.

Equally harmful was the fact that John D. Rockefeller, Jr., was philosophically much different from his father. Young Rockefeller surrounded himself with advisers who were hostile to capitalism and allowed them to quickly steer the foundation radically away from the desires of the senior Rockefeller. This was a heist worthy of the most audacious bank robbers, yet all done perfectly legally. In 1919, Rockefeller, Sr., tried to reassert control. He wrote to his attorney explaining what he wished to do to put his foundation back on what he regarded as the right track. The lawyer, however, was aghast at the idea of Rockefeller's controlling his own money and maneuvered to thwart his client's intentions. The foundation continued on its merry statist way, as it does to this day. The story of the Ford Foundation was sim ilar to Rockefeller's. Henry Ford was a staunch advocate of capitalism. He was virtu ally the only prominent industrialist who refused to cooperate with the National Recov ery Act, thus making himself a target of FDR and his New Dealers.

Confronted with New Deal "share the wealth" legislation that threatened to cost the Ford family control over the business he had built, Ford established the Ford Foundation in 1936. The foundation remained relatively small and unobtrusive until after World War II, but a tremendous infusion of wealth came in following Ford's death in 1947. Henry Ford II, a political moderate, allowed the founda54 THE FREEMAN/IDEAS ON LIBERTY • OCTOBER 1999 tion to fall into the hands of statist philan thropic professionals. Eventually, the younger Ford would resign from the board after being haughtily told by the foundation's president, McGeorge Bundy, that he was just one vote out of 16 and his family lineage meant noth ing. On resigning, Ford wrote that "the foun dation is a creature of capitalism, a statement that, I'm sure, would be shocking to many professional staff people in the field of phil anthropy. It is hard to discern recognition of this fact in anything the foundation does."

Wooster recounts other such disasters, but he also points to several instances where the wishes of the donors have been honored by their foundations, showing that the problem is not insoluble. He identifies several means by which wealthy individuals can ensure that their money is not later turned to purposes of which they would disapprove. The most important step is simply deciding to buck the trend of giving a free hand to "the professionals." Wooster writes, "The funda mental problem of philanthropy today is not "dead hand" control. It is donors who meekly follow prevailing wisdom and leave their for tunes to professionals who spend the money on causes they like-which are usually not the causes preferred by the donors." A timely, much-needed book. D George Leef is director of the Pope Center for High er Education Policy at the John Locke Foundation and book review editor of The Freeman.

The Crisis of Global Capitalism by George Soros PublicAffairs • 1998 • 245 pages • $26.00 Reviewed by Brink Lindsey R eading George Soros on international economic policy is like watching Michael Jordan-at bat. Both experiences reinforce the lesson that excellence in one field of endeavor doesn't necessarily translate into other areas. In Soros's case, success at playing the market does not extend to success at understanding it-or more precisely, the government policies that shape or distort it. In The Crisis of Global Capitalism, Soros rails against what he calls "market fundamen talism," or the belief that "the common inter est is best served by allowing everyone to look out for his or her own interests and that attempts to protect the common interest by collective decision making distort the market mechanism." This dogma, he asserts, "has rendered the global capitalist system unsound and unsustain,able."

His proposed response to the present peril: "To stabilize and regulate a truly global econ omy, we need some global system of political decision making. In short, we need a global society to support our global economy." Specifically, Soros recommends the creation of an International Credit Insurance Corpora tion, which would add upfront guarantees of foreign loans to the IMF's current post hoc mop-ups. To assert as Soros does that the world today is in the grip of "market fundamental ism" reveals a profoundly distorted view of events. Where are the governments today that toe a strict laissez-faire line? Where even are the opposition parties of any size that do so? Certainly the world has moved in leaps and bounds toward more market-oriented policies over the past couple of decades, but look who has led the charge-in China, Deng Xiao ping, a committed Communist; in India, ~ V. Narasimha Rao, a product of the Congress Party that instituted Soviet-style central plan ning there; in Argentina, Carlos Menem, a Peronist; in Peru, Alberto Fujimori, an agri cultural engineer and ideological cipher; and so on and so on. Yes, there have been reform ers who made their case in ideological terms-Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher, Vaclav Klaus-but they have been exception al. By and large, the worldwide rediscovery of markets has been guided by pragmatism a rejection of the failed dogma of collec tivism in favor of something, anything, that works.

And, of course, the move toward market oriented policies still has a very long way to go. Although collectivism may have perished as a living ideal, government interventionism remains a huge and distorting presence in the world economy. Market forces enjoy nothing like the unchallenged ascendancy that Soros claims for them; rather, they must contend with, struggle against, and slip through the loopholes of a massive and overextended pub lic sector. It is this uneasy coexistence between mar kets and statism that is the true source of instability in the global economy today. And oddly enough, Soros is not blind to this fact. The author frequently acknowledges how misguided interventionist policies-including unsustainable currency pegs and moral hazard-infected financial systems-led to the recent crises in Asia. Nevertheless, Soros urges, as a response to those crises, the cre ation of another layer of moral hazard in the form of international credit guarantees. Talk about the triumph of hope over experience!

Soros's hostility to markets stems from his theory of "reflexivity"-which boils down to the commonsense observation that some times people act not because of what they think, but because of what they think other people think. In financial markets, this phe nomenon can cause herd behavior, which in turn can cause bubbles and panics. Let's admit that all this is true. But what of it? The question isn't whether markets are perfect; it's whether markets and competition generally and in the long run work better than centralized bureaucratic control. The fact is that markets do sometimes overshoot, but there are limits: bubbles eventually burst, and panics subside. When a market trend begins to look precarious and unsustainable, there are enormous incentives-namely, the prospect of making a killing-to buck that trend and bring it down. George Soros should know: he's made billions that way.

What are the equivalent feedback mecha nisms that restrain and reverse the mistakes governments make? Are they as effective and reliable as those of the market? Let's see what Soros himself has to say: [M]arkets have a way of correcting their excesses; bull markets are followed by bear markets. Representative democracy seems to be less successful in this respect. It is true that governments and legislatures are BOOKS 55 regularly replaced by the electorate; that is how the system is designed. But democra cy seems incapable of correcting its own excesses. Well, well. If Soros would only take his own words to heart, he would see that opposi tion to his interventionist nostrums need not be a matter of dogmatic "fundamentalism." Simple realism is all that's required. Mean while, it is the continued recourse to govern ment interference which requires blind faith that somehow, this time, it will succeed. D Brink Lindsey is director ofthe Center for Trade Pol icy Studies at the Cato Institute.

Nixon's Economy: Booms, Busts, Dollars, and Votes by Allen 1. Matusow University Press of Kansas • 1998 • 324 pages • $35.00 Review by David L. Littmann A llen Matusow's book is a play-by-play description of Nixon's overwhelming pri ority-get elected! Not that Nixon was unin terested in the economy. He fully understood the political punishments and rewards that are meted out by rising or falling unemployment and interest rates. Nixon's feel for fiscal and monetary policies probably exceeded that of most, if not all, of his economic advisers, from whom he received a lot of dreadful advice. But Nixon, the author observes, madeeco nomics subservient to politics. Economic poli cies were simply tools of political expedience. Matusow portrays a President Nixon bored to death and even irritated by economic advice or theories that were not clear catalysts to his political ambition. Conversely,when econom ic theories, such as the "full employment bud get" concept or quotas on Japanese textiles, seemed to further his objectives, he was rapt in attention, participating actively in the ensuing policy debates and critiques.

Nixon sEconomy is well organized to take us through the economic turbulence of the 56 THE FREEMAN/IDEASON LIBERTY • OCTOBER 1999 Nixon years. Its chief strength is Matusow's description of the duplicity of Nixon's con duct of economic policy. He reveals the bla tant contradictions between the so-called con servative philosophy that one might think would have led Nixon to advocate tax cuts, smaller government budgets, repeal of regula tions, removal of trade barriers, and other laissez-faire policies. But no, precisely oppo site policies prevailed, culminating in the 1971-74 wage and price controls. Matusow's commentary on the contradic tions between theoretical Republican support for markets versus actual adoption by the administration of socialism is illuminating. Few politicians are long able to resist the temptation to wield governmental power for short-run political advantage. Professed limited-government principles are forgotten or deliberately cast aside when intervention ism seems to offer better political rewards.

(The author's observations are also relevant to what has befallen the "Republican Revolu tion" since 1995.) Sadly, Matusow, professor of history at Rice University, is himself weak on econom ics. While good at exposing the weaknesses and contradictions in Nixon's economic poli cies, one sees little indication that he is famil iar with serious freemarket analysis. Espe cially as regards monetary policy and the ori gins of the lethal inflation generated by the Nixon programs of the late '60s and early '70s, the author confuses cause and effect. For example, in chapter three Matusow claims that "the main reason why prices kept rising through 1970 ... was the big wage increases that workers were demanding and getting." He compounds this confusion in later chap ters, suggesting that currency devaluation and oil price hikes are causes of inflation. Errors like this are not isolated. By chapter six, perhaps in an effort to make the book more readable, the author resorts to normative assertions, using "good" and "bad" with ref erence to Uncle Sam's manipulation of the dollar vis-a-vis foreign currencies. Later, Matusow falls into the trap of stating that "controls deserved some credit for declin ing inflation." Yet, he elsewhere credits Mil ton Friedman's monetarist warning that inflation is always and everywhere a monetary phenomenon.

This unevenness is forgivable for a non economist. But some shortcomings cannot be excused. The story of the Nixon years would have been a considerably more valuable expo sition for future generations of readers and economists had the author included fewer ret rospective testimonies from apologists for the Keynesian school, and instead emphasized the disservice of "political economists" and power-hungry advisers, such as Paul Volcker, Arthur Burns, and John Connally. Also, con trary to the author's gratuitous statement that "no one in or out of government [in 1973] foresaw the approach of the [inflation] cata clysm," there were many nonpolitical econo mists who foresaw and wrote about the futility of controls and catastrophes that awaited economies adopting these bankrupt ing policies. Nixon s Economy is worthwhile and ger mane reading, making clear the important point that the incentives of politicians tend to put them disastrously at odds with sensible economic policies. The author's own lack of economic comprehension, unfortunately, ren ders the book less valuable than it might oth erwise have been. Read the book for its good history and take the author's economic pro nouncements with a grain of salt. 0 David Littmann is senior vice president and chief economist with Comerica Bank in Detroit, Michigan.

To Serve and Protect: Privatization and Community in Criminal Justice by Bruce Benson New York University Press, Political Economy of the Austrian School Series • 1998 • 416 pages • $37.50 Reviewedby MorganO. Reynolds O ver the last three decades, the share of GDP consumed by the public sector on crime control has tripled and now exceeds $100 billion annually, or about $1,000 per household. Crime rates have declined in the 1990s, suggesting some benefit from the expenditure, yet crime stubbornly remains three times higher than 30 years ago, accord ing to FBI statistics. These data imply a sub stantial decline in the productivity of law enforcement bureaucracies. The natural thought of a public choice economist is, "So what else would you expect?" Big government is no more likely to be the answer to crime than to any other prob lem. Private-sector solutions and market driven reforms are more likely to work. The root solution for crime is a set of institutions that get incentives right. Custom and law must internalize (privatize) more benefits for crime suppressors and make crime producers pay more of the costs they impose on victims.

Bruce Benson, professor of economics at Florida State University, pursues this logic brilliantly. Benson is a veteran researcher on crime and law, and in this volume he inte grates a sprawling literature in a way that changes the whole discussion. The book works on two distinct levels. First, it provides nearly encyclopedic coverage of private tech niques in criminal justice that range from medieval Anglo-Saxon days to contracting out of prisons today. Second, and more impor tant, it elevates us to a high philosophical plane by redirecting our attention from social engineering goals like deterrence and rehabil itation toward a focus on justice and individ ual rights and responsibilities. Like education, criminology has long been a field rent by fads. Lacking a real intellectu al anchor and populated primarily by sociolo gists, criminology has for the most part ignored a rights-based perspective. Benson's book fills that void. His premise is that justice for victims should be the goal of our justice system. All else follows from that premise.

Offenses thought of as crimes today, like murder and robbery, were once treated as pri vate torts, with economic compensation as the primary remedy. This private system of jus tice worked well and could do so again, according to Benson. With the prospect of recovery of damages, the victim had a greater incentive to report a crime, correcting a major failing in our present system where victims only report about 40 percent of crimes to the police. Restitution rights were transferable, BOOKS 57 thereby promoting efficiency in apprehension and liability. Our present reliance on the state to protect our property rights and control criminals is very recent, less than two centuries old in most respects. The historical reason for this evolution was that kings took away victims' property rights to restitution, and the path of criminal justice in England then wandered away from individualism toward collectivism.

In the tradition of Ronald Coase and Steven Cheung, who debunked the theories that pri vate markets must fail to supply lighthouses or pollinate fruit, Benson's historical research explodes the doctrine that a justice system is a "public good" that only government can provide. Perhaps Benson's most arresting evidence comes from Japan, which has the lowest crime rate among industrialized nations by far. A primary reason, claims Benson, is that their system is more privatized and victim oriented than ours. There, the fundamental right is for the victim to be restored to his original condition. In contrast to our culture, in the Japanese culture there is no acceptable excuse for criminal activity. The criminal must bargain for forgiveness with the victim and if the wrongdoer negotiates an acceptable settlement package and shows contrition, public-sector punishment is lenient. Benson documents the substantial private effort to combat crime in the United States, estimated at $300 billion a year, and therefore larger than the public-sector effort. This will continue to grow rapidly, Benson predicts, if only to compensate for continuing public fail ure. Our system is also moving toward vic tims' rights, recently enshrined in many state statutes and constitutions. Benson sees these as largely illusory gains because law enforcement bureaucracies have co-opted vic tims' rights organizations. He warns victims' groups that they must forge an independent path in order to transform criminals' "debts to society" into private, transferable debts to individual victims.

Shortcomings in the book are few and usu ally amount to legitimate differences of judg ment or opinion. Benson sometimes fails to use the latest data available, and ignores the 58 THE FREEMAN/IDEASON LIBERTY • OCTOBER 1999 < best estimates, say, for the probability of pros ecution on arrest. Sometimes he attributes facts like exclusionary rules to the statist nature of the justice system too quickly, ignoring competing hypotheses like rent seeking by lawyers. Clearly, the crime solution lies in more individual responsibility and less public responsibility. Benson's daring conclusion privatize both the demand for and the supply of criminal justice services-leaves us with a wealth of provocative diagnoses and exam ples for further research. Benson has given us a breakthrough book. D Morgan Reynolds is professor ofeconomics at Texas A&M University. Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed by James C. Scott Yale University Press • 1998 • 445 pages • $35.00 Reviewed by Aaron Steelman A mazing progress has been made in the twentieth century. The Western world has grown tremendously rich, and many develop ing countries around the world have "emerged." Today, most people enjoy living conditions that their ancestors could have only dreamed about.

But the twentieth century has also wit nessed horrific brutality. Millions have been killed in wars. And an even greater number, perhaps, have been killed by their own gov ernments in the name of "progress." What has been the source of such inhumanity? In Seeing Like a State, Yale political scien tist James C. Scott examines "the failure of some of the great utopian social engineering schemes of the twentieth century." He argues that "the most tragic episodes of state initiated social engineering originate in a per nicious combination of four elements." First, Scott argues, are "transformative state simplifications," that enable the state to easily track and classify its citizens. This includes the creation of permanent last names, population registers, and the standardization of language. Second is what Scott calls "high-modernist" ideology. "It is best conceived," he writes, "as a strong, one might even say muscle-bound, version of the self-confidence about scientific and technical progress, the expansion of pro duction, the growing satisfaction of human needs, the mastery of nature (including human nature), and, above all, the rational design of social order commensurate with the scientific understanding of natural laws."

National economic planning during World War I excited high-modernist theorists and led them to believe that society actually could be run by enlightened technocrats. The third element is an "authoritarian state that is willing and able to use the full weight of its coercive power to bring these high modernist designs into being." Such regimes often gain power during times of war, revolu tion, depression, and struggle for national liberation. The last element is a "prostrate civil society that lacks the capacity to resist these plans." "In sum," Scott writes, "the legibility of a society provides the capacity for large-scale social engineering, high-modernist ideology provides the desire, the authoritarian state provides the determination to act on that desire, and an incapacitated civil society pro vides the leveled social terrain on which to build." When those four elements are present, the stage is set for the likes of Hitler, Stalin, and Pol Pot-and for the forced villagization of 5 million Tanzanians in the 1970s, a lesser known tragedy that Scott recounts in a fasci nating chapter.

High-modernist ideology, Scott points out, manifests itself in less disastrous ways, too. Consider centrally planned cities. Traditional ly, cities have grown naturally to fit the desires and needs of their citizens. The streets of many European and Middle Eastern cities don't fit a grid-like pattern: they sprang up as the population grew and moved. To a resident, everything makes sense. But to a government official who thinks he knows best, it appears chaotic. Surely, a planned city would be much better than one developed seemingly by chance.

Such was the mindset of architect Charles Edouard Jeanneret, better known as Le Cor busier. He wished to redesign Paris, Buenos Aires, Algiers, and Moscow according to his own plans. He argued, "We must refuse to afford even the slightest concession to what is; to the mess we are in now. There is no solution to be found there." He envisioned a world, Scott writes, in which "door frames, windows, bricks, roof tiles, and even screws would all conform to a uniform code. [Le Corbusier] called for the new standards to be legislated by the League of Nations, which would develop a universal technical language to be compulsori ly taught throughout the world." In the end, Le Corbusier built only one city, a provincial capital in India. Scott notes, how ever, that he influenced many people, includ ing Brazilian president Juscelino Kubitschek. Kubitschek created the city of Brasilia from scratch and made it the country's capital.

Originally, there was one huge public square, but few informal gathering places such as parks, and all its residents were supposed to live in uniform housing projects called "superquadra," which had their own nurseries, schools, stores, and clubs. The planned city quickly failed; people found life in it undesirable and stifling. Now, most of the population lives in settlements that were never anticipated by Brasilia's plan ners. High-modernist ideology didn't result in mass slaughter in the case of Brasilia, but it did produce great unhappiness. People didn't want what the planners tried to force on them. The planners weren't able to acquire the "practical knowledge," as Scott calls it, to pull off such a grand scheme. They were ignorant of "the limits . . . of what we are likely to know about complex, functioning order." This is excellent analysis, but unfortunate ly, Scott thinks "large-scale capitalism" suf fers from similar defects. It "is just as much an agency of homogenization, uniformity, grids, and heroic simplification as the state is . . . . [I]n markets, money talks, not people,"

he argues. But when I decide to eat breakfast at McDonald's, who is making the decision? I am. I'm using money to buy the meal, but I'm the one doing the talking. In the market, pro ducers cater to the consumers' desires-not BOOKS 59 the other way around. Scott fails to grasp that point. Nevertheless, Seeing Like a State is a brilliant work of remarkable scope. 0 Aaron Steelman is a graduate student in the social sciences at the University of Chicago. Silencing Science by Steven Milloy and Michael Gough Cato Institute • 1998 • 68 pages • $8.00 paperback Reviewedby Kenneth Silber T his slim volume is an ironic how-to guide for heavy-handed regulators, panic-mongering activists, demagogic politi cians, venal trial lawyers, dogmatic religion ists, and anyone else with an interest in sti fling or manipulating science. In breezy style, the authors explain how to impede research and suppress data, using lawsuits, regulation, intimidation, and other methods. They also show how to fill the resulting void with mis information.

The authors-Milloy is publisher of the Junk Science Home Page (www.junkscience. com); Gough is the former director of science and risk studies at the Cato Institute-draw on numerous examples of science under siege. They present the persecution of Galileo as a cautionary tale (the Inquisition didn't crack down quickly enough to eliminate his influ ence) and cite the Scopes Monkey Trial as a useful model for interfering with science edu cation. They then launch into more recent anecdotes of obscurantism and obstruction ism. Unfortunately (or fortunately, if one remains in the book's ironic mode), there are many ways to silence science. Outlawing research is one option, the authors explain, pointing to efforts to place a wide-ranging ban on cloning experiments. Alternatively, science can be regulated into the ground, as when the Environmental Pro tection Agency moved to control pest resistant plants as if they were pesticides.

Government purse strings can be useful in tying up undesired research, such as fetal tis sue studies during the Reagan-Bush years. Nor is privately funded science immune to 60 THE FREEMAN/IDEAS ON LIBERTY • OCTOBER 1999 political attack; one need only stigmatize the research as profit-driven or linked (however tenuously) to Big Tobacco. Legal harassment works well, too. The authors describe how lawyers representing the alleged victims of silicone breast implants intimidated the Mayo Clinic with onerous demands for medical records. Another form of harassment is to make bogus claims of sci entific misconduct; this approach was used by "multiple chemical sensitivity" activists against researchers who raised doubts about that "disease." And don't forget about street protests and celebrity letter-writing cam paigns; such techniques helped animal-rights proponents prevent NASA from studying monkeys in orbit.

Even after a research project has been com pleted, there are various ways to hide or dis tort the resulting information, the authors point out reassuringly. Careful editing, for instance, allowed a United Nations report to overstate the threat of global warming. Anoth er method is simply not to publish the data; the Energy Department has kept a major radi ation study under wraps for years, providing only a brief summary in an obscure bulletin. California's environmental agency went this one better, systematically destroying research documents that did not support the agency's final decisions. The authors explain how to replace genuine science with various phony substitutes, such as "official science," "consensus science," and "the precautionary principle." The first con sists of governmental or other seemingly authoritative pronouncements that happen to be unsupported by evidence, such as a U.S.

Senate resolution that women in their 40s should have mammograms. The second involves claiming that there is agreement when in fact there is not, as occurs often in the global-warming debate. The precautionary principle, embraced by environmentalists, means that industrial chemicals and radiation are to be regarded as extremely dangerous, while contrary evidence and uncertainties are swept under the rug. While Silencing Science takes a lightheart ed approach, the underlying seriousness of the subject shines through. The suppression of science-whether motivated by politics, ide ology, or personal and financial gain-pro duces bad decisionmaking, increased risk, and diminished freedom. One comes away from this book with a heightened awareness of danger-a danger not only to scientists but to anyone who depends in any way on their research (everyone, that is, whose participa tion in modern society exceeds that of, say, the Unabomber).

The book's format does impose certain constraints. The "how-to" approach, while funny, would start to wear thin if the book were to go on much longer; at the same time, the overall subject deserves a more extensive treatment. A somewhat broader picture of the threats to science would take notice of acade mic postmodernism and New Age mysticism, movements that go unmentioned here. A deeper analysis, rather than merely reporting anecdotes, would delve into the conditions that enable anti-scientific tactics to thrive. Nevertheless, Silencing Science packs a great deal of valuable and thought-provoking material into its slender frame. The book deserves a wide readership. May that reader ship not include the anti-science types who might actually take its advice. D Kenneth Silber has written about science and tech nology for Reason, Insight, the New York Post, and other publications. Staring into Chaos: Explorations in the Decline of Western Civilization by B. G. Brander Spence Publishing • 1998 • 418 pages • $29.95 Reviewed by Gleaves Whitney T he right is temperamentally pessimistic.

The left is philosophically nihilistic. Both camps have long tended to see the West as culturally decadent, a civilization in decline. So it is odd that, for decades, virtually every major English-language reference work in the social sciences included articles about progress, but not its opposite. It was as though Americans were reluctant to give the impri matur to decadence and decline as major categories of thought. One had to look to the French for scholarship on decadence-per haps because they have had more firsthand experience with it than Americans. Only in recent years has cultural pessimism received the attention it deserves on this side of the Atlantic. After all, one cannot do seri ous intellectual history without confronting the pessimism of Nietzsche, Burckhardt, Dar win, and legions of other theorists of decline since the Renaissance. Their works are so numerous as to constitute a veritable type of literature, what I call the "decline-of-the West" genre.

Because English-language surveys of that genre have been few and far between, it is a pleasure to discover B. G. Brander's most recent book, Staring into Chaos: Explorations in the Decline of Western Civilization. Bran der is a full-time writer and a former editor for National Geographic-not the typical cre dentials for a student of cultural pessimism. Yet it is precisely because Brander is a layman who has escaped the perils of academic spe cialization that he is able to read the classic statements of the decline of the West from a fresh perspective. Brander is clear about his purpose from the outset, and readers should be too. He aims to "distill the insights of more than two-dozen thinkers into this single volume. . . . Where writers contributed whole books on the topic, I offer concise digests of their works." Thus Brander's book, while not categorized as such, functions as a reference work that will give readers a crash course in the decline-of the-West literature.

Early chapters introduce notions of cultural decadence and civilizational decline in the thought ofAlbert Schweitzer,Nikolai Berdyaev, Ernst von Lasaulx, Nikolai Danilevsky, and Henry and Brooks Adams, among others. Brander then trains his sights on three twenti eth-century giants of the genre-Oswald Spengler, Arnold Toynbee, and Pitirim Sorokin (to whose memory the book is dedi cated). In some 400 pages of text, Brander devotes about 100 pages to each one of these three, ably surveying their works and making them accessible to the educated lay public. Readers of this magazine will find much of BOOKS 61 interest in all three, but perhaps most of all Sorokin because of his concern over the fate of freedom and the rule of law. Sorokin, a Harvard sociologist, was already arguing in the 1930s that the West was undergoing one of the greatest transitions in history. Brander encapsulates some of Sorokin's predictions: "Governments will turn increasingly fraudu lent and tyrannical. Contracts and covenants will lose binding power and contractual soci ety will collapse. Democracy, capitalism, and [our] free society of free people will be swept away. Freedom will become a mere myth for the majority of people, whom centralized governments will deal with as puppets. Mean while, the dominant majority will turn their freedom into unbridled licentiousness." And this: "Private educational institutions will lose autonomy from government control and diminish in favor of public or state controlled schools." Prescient.

One question that inevitably arises in a sur vey is why certain thinkers were not included or were given only cameo roles. Christopher Dawson, for example, qualifies as one of the twentieth century's most insightful historians and theorists of decline. Brander, however, cites him only once in the text, and then fleet ingly, and lists none of his books in the bibli 0graphy. Perhaps this oversight will be addressed in a later edition. As we approach the millennium, many will seek to understand the signs of the times; many will have premonitions of decline. They would do well to go behind the culture wars of the present day and seek perspective through the provocative historical and social analysis of these giants. In Brander, they will find a competent and congenial guide. 0 Gleaves Whitney is chief speechwriter for Michigan Governor John Engler, senior fellow at the Russell Kirk Center for Cultural Renewal, and the senior scholar ofthe Centerfor the American Idea.

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