Book Reviews

Infantino presents a wide-ranging survey of central figures in sociology, political econo my, and philosophy to compare how individu alism and collectivism account for social order. Two hundred years ago David Hume argued that order does not entail an intelligence that creates it. Admittedly, what Adam Smith calls the "invisible hand," and what F. A. Hayek (following Michael Polanyi) calls a "sponta neous order" may seem planned. It is tempt ing to misread the complexities of an econo my as designed or at least as something design could improve. Appealing to figures such as Smith, Karl Popper, Ludwig von Mises, and Georg Sim mel, Infantino suggests that order must not be imposed. Free actors engage in mutually ben eficial exchanges that bureaucrats could not possibly fathom. The reciprocal relationships people voluntarily establish channel self interest to mutual advantage and promote a prosperous social order.

Social contract thinkers speak of individuals in a "natural condition" who literally construct a social order. Thomas Hobbes, for example, regarded men as having "sprung out of the earth, and suddenly (like mushrooms) come to full maturity, without all kind of engagement to each other." Infantino prefers Smith, Bernard Mandeville, and Popper, all of whom dismissed the idea of a pre-social "pure self." Society is necessary to generate language, moral norms, and an individual's very capaci ty for self-awareness. Infantino writes, "When man discovers himself, he is already united with others by a social bond; he does not need to create it." Our natural social situation thus militates against social "constructivism." The norms that emerge in society ought to be privileged, Infantino argues. If norms per sist, he writes, "it is because they answer to the needs of the social actors." But one then wonders why government (particularly intru sive government) has emerged and endures.

Without appealing to moral values, it is unclear how the norms of liberty and free exchange are better than the norms by and through which government exists and func tions. Noting this omission is not necessarily a criticism of Infantino so much as it is a potential problem with any defense of liberal social order. A significant portion of the text is dedicat ed to lengthy (albeit useful) citations. It is sometimes unclear, however, how topics among (and even within) chapters cohere in a unified project. Infantino's frequent refer ences to figures and concepts in the social sci ences may also seem esoteric to the uninitiat ed. The general reader may find the book hard going in places. The book could have drawn stronger links between tyranny and a closed society. Infanti no makes some gestures in this direction, but one wishes he had cast a stronger argument to show that constructivism cannot help but pro duce political and economic malaise. Similar ly, the book could have shown more forceful ly how spontaneous order and individual free dom go hand in hand. Here, we only see glimpses of the connections.

Lorenzo Infantino· has provided a splendid overview of key figures in the social sciences, how they compare on the issues of political order, and the best way to analyze collective entities. Had he fleshed out the links among his various lines of discussion and done more to clarify the comparisons among thinkers for the reader, the book would have been more useful yet. Still, the author is to be congratu lated for his work on this vital topic. D Andrew Cohen is assistant professor ofphilosophy at the University of Oklahoma. Freedom and Virtue: The Conservative/Libertarian Debate edited by George W Carey Intercollegiate Studies Institute • 1998 • 231 pages • $24.95 Reviewed by Brian Doherty L ibertarians and conservatives seem to want to get along; how else explain this book's existence? It was published by the Intercollegiate Studies Institute, a now conservative organization founded by liber tarian journalist Frank Chodorov as the Inter collegiate Society of Individualists. What happened when Chodorov passed control of his organization to more conservative charac ters is emblematic of the conservative/liber tarian divide that this book explores but fails to bridge: they removed "individualist" from the name, cobbling together a contentless phrase to maintain the initials.

Fear of the unbridled individual is at the root of the conservative/libertarian conflict over freedom and virtue. The conservative fears that people unleashed from the power of the Leviathan state will bring society to rot and ruin; indeed, at least one writer here (Frederick Wilhelmsen) argues that it already has. Libertarians think that, given the corruption of man that conservatives are so prone to emphasize, granting corrupt men power to enforce their vision of virtue is dan gerous-and that for various reasons both moral and prudential, violence (the root of all state power) should be used solely to repel or reverse assaults on one's own person or property. BOOKS 47 The essays collected here limn some of the difficulties that arise when libertarians and conservatives debate. The debate isn't settled because the combatants don't clarify the two positions or even prove that there is in fact a coherent conservative position. Even the lib ertarian side seems incoherent, with John Hospers, author of a book called Libertarian ism and first presidential candidate of the Libertarian Party, having trouble sticking to the basic Millian position that state power oughtn't be used except to prevent harm to others. "Freedom is a great thing," he opines, "but one should not run the danger of destroy ing oneself in the pursuit of it."

Anthologies raise more issues than a brief review can note; I here concentrate on a couple of themes. The obvious, though unintended, lesson of this book is that there is no coherent conservative position. Some people seem to choose the term for sociological reasons of loose affinity and thus define it to mean what ever they believe. Comparing the views pre sented here by such supposed conservatives as Richard Weaver and L. Brent Bozell shows that the word means, as Humpty Dumpty said, whatever we want it to mean. Bozell thinks enforcing virtue through violence quite proper; he claims that within the Christian metaphysic he posits as essential to both con servatism and American civilization, "free dom is hardly a blessing; add the ravages of original sin and it is the path to disaster." Weaver, on the other hand, thinks that "the conservative in his proper character and role is a defender of liberty. He is such because he takes his stand on the real order of things and because he has a very modest estimate of man's ability to change that order through the coercive power of the state. He is prepared to tolerate diversity of life and opinion because he knows that it is right within reason to let each follow the law of its own being." In this, Weaver finds himself embracing the libertari an argument, derived from Scottish enlighten ment thinkers and promulgated most thor oughly this century by F. A. Hayek, that man can and does form complex workable orders without government control or management.

One issue that is perhaps even more divisive between libertarians and conservatives comes 48 THE FREEMAN/IDEAS ON LIBERTY • DECEMBER 1999 up frequently: war and peace. Conservatives tout the importance of an activist u.s. world military to fight off Soviet communism, or now that that is dead, what Robert Nisbet here sees as the "aggressive, imperialist totalitari anisms in the world." The only specific exam ples he gives are China and Cuba. While none of the libertarians collected here talk about foreign policy, the conservatives clearly are irritated that many libertarians refuse to bow to the exigencies of u.S. world imperialism. This volume is worthwhile for interesting contributions from both sides, such as M. Stanton Evans's intriguing contention that pre-enlightenment traditions contain more support for limited state power than many moderns customarily suppose and Doug Bandow's argument from an evangelical Christian perspective that, contra Bozell, state power has no useful role to play in the enforcement of Christian morality.

But essays like Russell Kirk's, where he condemns libertarians as "metaphysically mad," and obsesses over his notion that liber tarians are disproportionately gay and very unpleasant characters besides, show that how ever much they may find themselves allied in specific instances against state encroachment, the relationship between libertarians and con servatives is apt to remain one of occasional alliance and persistent mistrust. D Brian Doherty is the Warren Brookes Fellow at the Competitive Enterprise Institute. World Disorders: Troubled Peace in the Post-ColdWar Era by Stanley Hoffmann Rowman & Littlefield. 1998 • 279 pages • $29.95 Reviewed by Ivan Eland H arvard professor Stanley Hoffmann is an unbridled interventionist. Although he decries any American role as the global policeman, he proposes intervening for so many purposes and under so many circum stances that chevrons begin to form on his shoulders.

Hoffmann rejects the argument that the United States should withdraw from entangle ments and international commitments. Although he admits that few threats to Ameri can vital interests exist-he makes an excep tion for the Middle East-he declares that a world of diffuse disorder could rapidly become a dangerous place. He argues that societies and economies are too interdependent for the Unit ed States to be sure that what happens in small, poor, weak nations will not affect Americans. He maintains that apathy about what happens in "far away countries of which we know noth ing" can lead through contagion-and through the message that passivity sends to trouble makers-to "creeping escalation of disorder and beastliness that will, sooner or later, reach the shores of the complacent, the rich, and the indifferent." In short, Hoffmann endorses the domino theory of instability. He then goes even further, taking issue with those who say that U.S. foreign policy should be based on interests and not values.

Hoffmann asserts that morality is a national interest. Thus Hoffmann advocates intervention in foreign internal crises when the turmoil threatens regional or international security or when human rights violations become so massive that they cannot be ignored. His broad definition of massive human rights vio lations includes genocide, mass killings short of genocide, ethnic cleansing, brutal and large-scale repression, mass rape, famines, epidemics, massive breakdowns of law and order, and flights of refugees. Not only does Hoffmann favor unilateral U.S. intervention under those circumstances, but he advocates the formation of an interna tional military force under United Nations auspices-with member nations pledging ear marked forces for use by the Security Coun cil. The international force would conduct limited police operations against minor trou blemakers or deter aggression against threat ened states that ask for U.N. troop deploy ments. He laments that no international taxa tion exists to support such a force. Given the record of the United Nations in peacekeeping missions, the potential for catastrophic bungling in more ambitious military missions makes this proposal scary.

Our author has an activist military agenda but fails to provide priorities for intervention by a nation that has limited funds and military assets. Even the sole remaining superpower has its limits. More important, although Hoffmann understands that interventions can be difficult, he should realize that in many cases they fail (clan warfare continued after the United States left Somalia, and Haiti is sliding back into dictatorship) and that often outsiders cannot deal with intractable prob lems that have been around for decades or centuries. Hoffmann identifies and labels three groups in the American foreign policy community: sheriffs, missionaries, and beacons. The sher iffs want to stop the bad guys of the interna tional community at high noon. The mission aries eschew force and advocate foreign aid and public and private programs to export democracy and market capitalism. In contrast to the other two camps, the beacons merely want the United States to be a showcase of liberty and free enterprise for other nations to emulate. It is unfortunate that this book gives short shrift to the beacons and so extols the costly, dangerous alternatives. D Ivan Eland is director ofdefense policy studies at the Cato Institute.

The Food & Drink Police-America's Nannies, Busybodies and Petty Tyrants by James T. Bennett and Thomas 1. DiLorenzo Transaction • 1999 • 161 pages • $24.95 Reviewed by George C. Leef T hreats to the freedom of Americans to make their own choices and run their own lives are proliferating· as fast as mushrooms after a heavy summer rain. Some have already grown to huge, Alice-in-Wonderland propor tions (like the IRS), while many others are just sprouting. In the latter category is the threat to our freedom to choose what to con sume. Prohibition is gone, but prohibitionists lurk among us. This new book from Bennett and DiLorenzo is about them-America's BOOKS 49 nannies, busybodies, and petty tyrants, as their subtitle says. We have always had nags and scolds. In a free society, people are entitled to use their liberty in peaceful ways of their choosing and that includes hectoring other people about their choices. Putting up with them, listening if we desire or ignoring them when we would rather be left alone, is one of free dom's tradeoffs. (In fact, there are probably people who regard us as nags and scolds, always telling them not to support Social Security, minimum-wage laws, trade restric tions, and so forth.) The trouble begins when they start turning to the coercive power of the state to impose their desires and val ues on others. Bennett and DiLorenzo intro duce us to a host of individuals and organi zations that want to tell you what to eat and drink, and have no compunction about employing the power of the state to make you behave.

One of the chief villains of the book is the Center for Science in the Public Interest (CSPI). The authors paid a visit to the Wash ington office of CSPI, where "Scarecrows scurried here and there, grimly clutching faxes and fact sheets that no doubt proved or at least asserted with the basso voice of pseudo-scientific surety that whatever you are eating at this very moment will kill you." That would not bother me (or the authors) except that the CSPI folks are not content just to warn about overindulging in creme braZee. They scowl at virtually everything tastier than a plate of rice and lentils and want to make certain that you don't push that aside in favor of the creme braZee. "The Center's agenda," write the authors, "is harsh neo-Puritanism. Ban, restrict, end, and regulate are common admonitions in CSPI's publications." Another malefactor is Jeremy Rifkin, a for mer left-wing activist turned food nanny.

Progress of all kinds worries Rifkin, but progress in food leaves him especially queasy. The bioengineering of food to make plants more beneficial to humans is something that we have been doing on a hit-or-miss basis for thousands of years, but now that science has figured out how to deliberately alter the genet ic makeup of a plant to add or subtract just the 50 THE FREEMAN/IDEAS ON LIBERTY • DECEMBER 1999 right trait, Rifkin and cohorts go berserk. His weapon of choice is the lawsuit. If someone wants to experiment with, say, genetically altered strawberries that are supposed to be more frost-resistant, he can count on Rifkin to seek an injunction on the grounds that some vague federal statute has not been fully com plied with. That tactic has slowed progress in food production that would benefit everyone, but poorer people the most. Busybodies don't care much about the consequences of their actions, however.

Freedom of speech is something the food and drink police care about just about as much as they care for a dish of Haagen-Dazs with hot fudge. Because the Supreme Court has ruled that "commercial speech" falls mostly outside the First Amendment, the nannies are constantly running off to the bureaucrats and courts to strike down adver tising or labeling that bothers them. Our neo prohibitionists and the regulators at the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms have conspired, for example, to prohibit the sellers of alcoholic beverages from so much as hinting that there is scientific evidence that moderate amounts of alcohol can be good for people. The authors also relate zany battles over the naming of products, such as Crazy Horse Malt Liquor. The book is written with a great deal of humor and sarcasm, but make no mistake Bennett and DiLorenzo are deadly serious in alerting Americans to the growing menace of regulation of our eating choices. They write, "There is much more at stake here than how much tax one will pay on one's twinkies, how many beers one may consume at Pizza Hut after a softball game, or the character of Bud weiser ads. What is at issue.is how much per sonal responsibility Americans should assume for their own behavior, and conse quently, how much personal freedom they will enjoy."

Precisely. Congratulations to the authors for this splendid counterattack against all those busybodies who want to dictate what you eat and drink. D George Leef is director ofthe Pope Center for High er Education Policy at the John Locke Foundation and book review editor of The Freeman. The Political Economy of the New Deal by Jim F. Couch and William F. Shughart II Edward Elgar. 1998 • xvi + 247 pages • $85.00 Reviewed by Andrew ~ Morriss I n this work, Professors Jim Couch (Univer sity of North Alabama) and William Shughart (University of Mississippi) employ public-choice theory to provide an insightful look at the New Deal. The authors mix exam ination of historical evidence and economet ric analysis of recently rediscovered data on the spending patterns of New Deal programs to argue that the Roosevelt administration used the massive spending for political pur poses. Written in a lively and engaging tone, the book also provides a thorough summary of the extensive literatures on the Depression and the New Deal. Economists will welcome its thorough exploration of the data; non economists will appreciate its clear presenta tion of both the statistical and nonstatistical material.

The first chapter of the book surveys the academic literature on the causes and impact of the Great Depression and the critiques of the New Deal. Concisely summarizing multi ple theories about those causes (business cycle, monetary policy, underconsumption, and a range of others), the authors effectively convey the basics of a complex and volumi nous literature. Among the most compelling features of this chapter is a chart portraying the growth of the New Deal programs over time. This fascinating diagram makes clear the vast scale of New Deal spending. The next three chapters offer similarly well written and thorough descriptions of the New Deal programs. Although primarily summa rizing prior work on the New Deal, the authors add a market-oriented critique to the literature survey. For example, they make a point of noting that the Roosevelt administra tion's approach in the "first New Deal"

(1933-1935) was built around an "anti market ideology" that "placed much hope in the central government's ability to produce favorable results" and attributed the Depression to the market. Well-chosen examples of New Deal-era political cartoons enliven these chapters. My favorite, titled "The Sower," shows New Dealer Harry Hopkins scattering cash from a sack labeled "WPA" across a map of the South, remarking to Agriculture Secre tary Henry Wallace "Shucks Henry, You've never seen a bumper crop! Wait 'til you get a look at this beauty!" In a sense, the remainder of the book is a thorough analysis in support of the message of that cartoon. Couch and Shughart provide extensive his torical evidence to show that New Deal legis lation lacked·the checks and balances neces sary to restrain political use of the programs. For example, they quote Michigan Senator Arthur Vandenberg's comment that the bill establishing the Works Progress Administra tion (WPA) could be "simplified by merely striking out all the text and substituting two brief sections: Section 1. Congress hereby appropriates $4,880,000,000 to the President of the United States to use as he pleases. Sec tion 2. Anybody who does not like it is fined $1,000. That is approximately the net result of this proposed legislation."

The unique contribution of the book lies in the remaining chapters. Here Couch and Shughart deploy public-choice analysis to understand the spending patterns of the New Deal programs. Relying both on data unearthed in 1969 on New Deal spending across states and additional data the authors discovered in the 1939 Congressional Record, Couch and Shughart conclude that "political self-interest was perhaps the most important motive underlying the administra tion's spending decisions. A state's popular vote for FDR in the 1932 election and its importance to the President's electoral col lege strategy are consistently. [statistically] significant determinants of the amount of federal aid it received." While the authors build on and challenge earlier empirical work on the New Deal, their analysis is more complete. While space does not permit a complete survey of either the methods or the statistical results here, Couch and Shughart have produced a work that at least ought to shift the burden of persuasion to FDR's defenders.

BOOKS 51 Although various quibbles are possible with some features of Couch and Shughart's number crunching and their review of prior literature, none is important enough to detract from their overall accomplishment of recast ing the New Deal in public-choice terms. From Lyndon Johnson's Great Society to Hillary Rodham Clinton's communing with the ghost of Eleanor Roosevelt, statists have sought to hide in the shadow cast by the "suc cess" of the "Relief, Recovery, and Reform" programs of the New Deal. Revealing the bla tantly political nature of those programs is an important step in restoring balance to our political and historical dialogues. D Andrew Morriss is a contributing editor of The Free man and professor of law and associate professor of economics at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio. Toward the Renewal of Civilization: Political Order and Culture edited by T. William Boxx and Gary M. Quinlivan William B. Eerdmans Publishing • 1998 • 222 pages • $16.00 Reviewed by Fr. Robert A. Sirico T o explore the relationship between poli tics and culture with an eye toward the "renewal of civilization" is a tall order for one volume. And yet the contributors to this col lection do an admirable job of examining many facets of the intersection between political-cultural trends and what most of these authors regard as the decline of civilized standards in arts, letters, behavior, and law, not only in this .country but throughout the West. But Toward the Renewal ofCivilization is no gloom-and-doom tract about the end of the world; indeed, it ends on a wonderfully hopeful note.

This book had special poignancy for me, because I read it after last spring's Littleton, Colorado, high-school shootings. The two young killers had jettisoned· civilized norms long before the shooting began, but it appears that adults around the kids were paralyzed 52 THE FREEMAN/IDEAS ON LIBERTY • DECEMBER 1999 with confusion and fear about how to respond. They tried psychiatrists and drugs and a bit of counseling, but for the most part, the parents, teachers, and school administra tors were just biding their time, hoping the kids would straighten out naturally. Why have such events become almost rou tine? Hilton Kramer argues that they are a consequence of the institutionalized counter culture that began in the sixties. The intellec tual error is rooted in the philosophy of Jean Jacques Rousseau, and specifically the belief that received norms, social customs, institu tionalized authorities, and traditional stan dards of accomplishment and morality are merely artifices designed to inhibit the natur al development of the human person. The object, then, is to break free from these sup posed artificial restraints, which is precisely what the boys in Littleton imagined them selves doing.

The notion of tyranny is different in each respective vision of what constitutes the nat ural society. In classical liberalism, tyranny is associated with violence, whether perpetuated by private parties or invasive government. To the Rousseauian, tyranny is bound up with societal expectation, as Claes Ryn points out in his brilliantly argued essay. What's more, he writes, "the longing for Rousseauian liber ation often expresses an ominous drive for uninhibited power." For Ryn, the cultural crisis comes down to a misapplication of the capacity of humans to imagine social improvement. Instead of turn ing this impulse toward the creation of great art and literature, modern man has turned it toward escapism on one hand and a futile attempt to reconstruct society itself on the other. The result, writes William Allen in his essay, has been that radical challenges to liberal democracy have taken hold in the acade my and spilled out into society to create a kind of slow-motion French Revolution against the family. and other foundational institutions of the genuinely free society. Eliz abeth Fox-Genovese concentrates on that point in her eloquent essay.

The hot-button issues of race and sex are not skirted in these pages, for they too have become bound up .with a political tug of war in recent years. With rights given out by the regime to groups according to their lobbying power and their .ability to form pressure groups based on shared identity, the politics of race and sex has become a game of spoils in which no one can be said to win. The old racism mutates into a new racism with scarce ly a thought given to the possibility that human cooperation and social peace are pos sible only when the state does not interfere with people's freedom of association. If the book has a weakness it is that the state is not consistently identified as a leading cause of the continued weakening of essential social institutions. The contributors do not make the mistake of viewing the solution to every social problem as resting with political authority, but that is not the same as identify ing the state as the culprit.

They rightly see intellectual and spiritual rejuvenation as the likely font of a cultural renewal-which is the only long-term means of combating the moral nihilism at the heart of the Littleton shootings. The book strongly reinforces the central point of classicalliber alism: society manages itself better than any rationalistic intellectuals who grab hold of the reins of power ever have or could. D Fr. Robert A. Sirico is president ofthe Acton Institute for the Study of Religion and Liberty in Grand Rapids, Michigan.