Two Treatises on the Acquisition and Use of Power

JUDE P. DOUGHERTY is Professor Emeritus and Dean Emeritus of the School of Philosophy, The Catholic University of America. He is editor of the Review of Metaphysics and author of the recently published Wretched Aristotle.

Some cultural historian of the future,
some future Gibbon, will record the
decline and fall of a once-great nation, how
it lost contact with its founding documents
and with the spiritual traditions that animated
its growth and how it succumbed to
the siren song of a charismatic leader who
led it to its dissolution in a visionary, multicultural,
universal democracy.

As the United States in a troubled time
faces a questionable future, we instinctively
turn to the past to determine in the
light of similar circumstances what the
future may portend. To the untutored eye,
studies of the past with reference to the
future, although always an active literary
genre, seem to be appearing with greater
frequency. Rémi Brague has employed
his significant command of medieval history
to explore the relation that prevailed
among Christianity, Islam, and Judaism in
the Middle Ages, with an eye on the current
European effort to integrate an Islamic
influx from the Middle East and North
Africa.¹ Adrian Goldsworthy has produced
a new study of the decline and fall of the
Roman Empire, and though he disclaims
any thought of relevance to the present,
he cannot avoid reference to the United
States and even cites his participation in a
seminar of established historians organized
by the Center for Strategic and Budgetary
Assessment under American sponsorship.
After chronicling the course of the Roman
Empire from its peak at the death of Marcus
Aurelius in 180 to the abortive effort of
the Eastern Empire to recapture its lost territories
in the sixth century, Goldsworthy,
in his conclusion, assures the reader that
the United States is not of necessity destined
to repeat the Roman decline.² Paul
A. Rahe has produced a study of Montesquieu
on war, religion, and commerce that
he clearly regards as relevant to contemporary
political discourse.³

Apart from these serious studies, two
treatises on the acquisition and use of power
written in the middle of the twentieth century
are worth revisiting, for they retain a
frightful puissance. I have in mind those of
Bertrand de Jouvenel and F. A. Hayek.

I

Though often neglected as a cultural historian,
Bertrand de Jouvenel’s work, On
Power: Its Nature and the History of Its
Growth,⁴ remains timely although it was
written more than sixty years ago. Penned
during the dark days of the Nazi occupation
of France, the book was published in
1945 at the first opportunity after the war’s
end and appeared in English translation five
years later. Up against the raw power of the
German occupation, de Jouvenel, the philosopher
and historian, was led to reflect
on the nature of power in the abstract. He
set out to examine the reasons why and the
way in which Power grows in society. As he
uses the word, “Power” is always capitalized;
it may stand for authority, the ruler, or
simply the drive for dominance.

On Power can be read at different levels:
as history, as prophecy, as political theory.
Pierre Manent, exploring the course of selfgovernment
in Europe, speaks of de Jouvenel’s
“melancholy liberalism.”⁵ Given de
Jouvenel’s sweeping command of history,
he can make a case for every judgment or
argument he advances in the book by citing
numerous historical examples in support,
yet his experience of Hitler’s rise to
power in the 1930s cannot be discounted
as a coloring factor. The book is a call for
repeated stock-taking, for an extended
scrutiny of every new proposal that would
extend the power of the state. Do not leap
into the dark, he cautions his countrymen
at war’s end; beware of letting “necessity,”
the tyrant’s plea, have its way.

Politics is about Power, he tells us: “It
is in the pursuit of Utopia that the aggrandizers
of state power find their most effective
ally. Only an immensely powerful
apparatus can do all that the preachers of
panacea government promise.”⁶ De Jouvenel
believes that history shows that the
acceptance of all-embracing state authority
is largely due to the fatigue and despair
brought about by war or economic disorder.
The European may say that liberty is
the most precious of all things, yet as the
experience of France attests, it is not valued
as such by people who lack bread and water.
The will to be free in time of danger is easily
extinguished. Liberty becomes a secondary
need; the primary need is security.

One of the pitfalls of democracy is its lack
of accountability. The popular will is easily
manipulated. It recognizes no authority
outside itself that possesses the strength to
limit its excesses. The dethronement of the
old faith to which the state was accountable
left an aching void in the domain of beliefs
and principles, allowing the state to impose
its own. Without accountability, democracy,
because of its centralizing, patternmaking,
absolutist drive, can easily become
an incubator of tyranny. The kings of old,
the personification of power, were possessed
of personality, of passions good and
bad. More often than not, their sense of
responsibility led them to will “the good”
for their people. Power within a democracy,
by contrast, resides in a faceless and
impersonal bureaucracy that claims to have
no existence of its own and becomes the
anonymous, impersonal, passionless instrument
of what is presumed to be the general
will. Writing in France when the Roosevelt
Administration was barely ten years
old, de Jouvenel feared the long-range
danger posed by the many regulatory commissions
created by that administration. He
saw that agencies simultaneously possessing
legislative, executive, and judicial control
could operate largely outside of public control
and become tyrannical.

The extension of Power, which means
its ability to control a nation’s economy
ever more completely, is responsible for
its ability to wage war. De Jouvenel asks,
“Had Hitler succeeded Maria Theresa on
the throne, does anyone suppose that it
would have been possible to forge so many
up-to-date weapons of tyranny?”⁷

It is, alas, no longer possible for us to
believe that by smashing Hitler and his
regime we are eradicating the root of stat
ist evil: “Can anyone doubt that a state
which binds man to itself by every tie of
need will be better placed to conscript
them all, and one day consign them to
the dooms of war? The more departments
of life that Power takes over, the greater
will be its material resources for making
war.”⁸ Even within a democracy the vast
resources of the state are ripe for a dictator
to seize. The bold, by discounting all
risk, are positioned to seize all initiatives
and become the rulers, while the timid
run for cover and security: “The more
complete the hold which the state gets on
the resources of a nation, the higher, the
more sudden, the more irresistible, will be
the wave in which an armed community
can break on a pacific one. . . . It follows
that, in the very act of handing more of
ourselves to the state, we may be fostering
tomorrow’s war.”⁹

Aristotle in the Politics reduced the variety
of governmental structures that he had
studied to three: monarchy, aristocracy,
and democracy, recognizing that whatever
shape a government takes, the essence of
governing is Power. Force may establish
Power, but once established, habit alone
can keep it in being. A standing center
of Power that is obeyed by habit has, in
the case of the state, the means of physical
compulsion and is kept in being partly by
its perceived strength, partly by the faith
that it rules by right, and partly by the hope
of its beneficence. The natural tendency of
Power is to grow. Power is authority, and
authority enables its own expansion.¹⁰

Power, when dedicated to egalitarian
pursuits, must always be at war with capitalist
authorities and despoil the capitalists
of their accumulated wealth.¹¹ Its political
objective consists in the demolition of
a class that enjoys “independent means,”
by seizing the assets of that class to bestow
benefits on others. The result is a transfer
of power from productive individuals to
an unproductive bureaucracy that becomes
the new ruling class, displacing that which
was economically productive. The top state
authorities, in alliance with the bottom
(that is, the oppressed), squeeze out the
middle (the Establishment) and in so doing
progressively penetrate ever deeper into
the personal lives of citizens. The point of
course has been made by others, notably
by F. A. Hayek, who called attention to
the fact that an assault on property rights
is not always apparent because it is carried
out in the name of the common good, an
appealing but elastic concept defined by
those whose interest it serves.

Given that all political activity is concerned
with the acquisition of Power,
both to seize and to maintain the organs
of Power, one must first gain control of
public education at its early stages. A state
monopoly in education has the ability to
condition minds in childhood for its later
years, thereby preparing popular opinion
for the seizure by the state of even
greater Power.¹² De Jouvenel reminds his
reader that in times past Western Europe has
acknowledged that there is a will superior
to the collective will of man and that there
is an immutable law to which even civil
authority must bow. Absent that acknowledgment,
Power has free reign. “Even
the police regime, the most insupportable
attribute of tyranny, has grown in the
shadow of democracy.”¹³ France, disliking
the minority rule of one person, deposed
the crown and subsequently organized
itself in the light of mass interests only
to discover that when the majority holds
Power over a minority, justice within a
democracy can be as elusive as it is in a
despotic regime.

De Jouvenel’s translator couldn’t resist
a postscript, “One of the first casualties
in times of discord is, as Thucydides
noted, the meaning of words, and to the
Thucydidean list of inexactitudes, it is
time to add the current equation of liberty
with security, the possession of a vote
with liberty, and justice with equality . . .
of democratic with whatever the user of
the word happens to approve. Humpty
Dumpty has succeeded to the chair of
more precise thinkers.”¹⁴

Yves R. Simon, born in Cherbourg in
1903, the same year de Jouvenel was born
in the Champagne region, was in his early
thirties when he witnessed Hitler’s rise to
power. At the outbreak of the war, Simon
was a visiting professor in the United
States. Remaining in America, he eventually
became a member of the Committee
on Social Thought at the University of
Chicago. From this vantage-point, Simon,
like de Jouvenel, surveyed the ruins of
Europe and in his own way addressed
the conditions that brought it about.¹⁵
Influenced by Pierre Joseph Proudhon,
no friend of democracy, Simon was fearful
that democracy, far from excluding a
totalitarian regime, would in time actually
give way to one. Absent appropriate
checks and balances, the legal processes of
the democratic state may work in such a
way as to allow the elimination of democracy.
Of equal importance to whatever
checks and balances may be prescribed by
law or inscribed in a constitution, are those
that are in a sense external to the political
structure, namely, private property and
independent management of resources.
“When people acquiesce to the removal of
all checks on the conquering expansion of
the state, the totalitarian regime is firmly
established.” Simon was convinced that an
impersonal authority could not win such an
irrational surrender, but that a leader with
charismatic talents could win approval.¹⁶
We know from experience, he says, that
where totalitarianism prevails, democracy
has no chance, yet few men dare to voice
the paradoxical consideration that democracy
may become totalitarian. Totalitarian
democracy, of course, would not be true
democracy.¹⁷ Proudhon maintains that the
state, whether democratic or not, remains
the state and by its very nature threatens all
liberties and the very life of society.

De Jouvenel has yet another concern. In
a democratic regime, we are told, the general
interest is represented by Power. From
this postulate flows the corollary that no
interest is legitimate that opposes the general
interest. For this reason even local or
particular interest must yield to the general
interest, in de Jouvenel’s words, “bend its
knee to Power.” Power, which is conceived
as the incarnation of the general will, cannot
tolerate any group that embodies particular
wishes and interests.¹⁸

The distinguished American historian,
Richard Pipes, a former director of
Harvard’s Russian Research Center and
a specialist in Russian history, reinforces
de Jouvenel’s judgment that democratic
procedures in electing government offi-
cials do not guarantee respect for individual
rights. The right to property, he
maintains, may be more important than
the right to vote.¹9 Property of itself does
not guarantee civil rights and liberties, but,
historically speaking, it has been the most
effective device for ensuring both. Property
has the effect of creating an autonomous
sphere on which, by mutual consent,
neither the state nor society can encroach.
In drawing a line between the public and
the private sphere, it makes its owner, as it
were, co-sovereign with the state.

Even so, once “the elimination of poverty”
becomes a state objective, the state
is bound to treat property not as a fundamental
right that it has an obligation to
protect but as an obstacle to “social justice.”
²⁰ Even in the most advanced democracies,
the main threat to liberty may come
not from tyranny but from the pursuit of
socialist objectives. Liberty by its very
nature, Pipes reminds us, is inegalitarian.
Men differ in strength, intelligence, ambition,
courage, perseverance, and all else
that makes for success. There is no method
to make men both free and equal. In the
pursuit of equality, property rights may
be subtly undermined through taxation
and government interference with business
contracts as the state pursues its egalitarian
objectives. Insofar as poor voters always
and everywhere outnumber rich ones, in
theory there are no limits to the democratic
state’s drive to promote equality
and to run roughshod over the rights of
private property. “The rights to ownership,”
Pipes argues, “need to be restored
to their proper place instead of being sacrificed to the unattainable ideal of social
equality and all embracing economic security.
. . . The balance between ‘civil’ and
‘property’ rights has to be readdressed if
we care about freedom.”²¹ He continues,
“The Civil Rights Act of 1964 gave the
government no license to set quotas for
hiring personnel by private enterprise or
admitting students to institutions of higher
learning, and yet the federal bureaucracy
acts as if it had.”²²

Some fear, Pipes acknowledges, that the
drive for social justice will inevitably lead
to the destruction of democracy, yet he is
not drawn to that pessimistic conclusion.
He reasons that encroachments on property
cannot advance relentlessly to their
logical conclusion, the abolition of private
property, because the most affluent are
twice as likely to vote as the poorest. If
he were addressing the subject today, some
ten years later, I am not sure he would
be so sanguine. The prospect of government
control of all aspects of the electoral
process looms as the present administration
is now positioned to mobilize the
vote through federally funded organizations
and through redistricting by taking
direct control of the census. Not to be discounted
is the distorting effect of monolithic
media able to advance their own
political agenda in concert with officials
who share their objectives. De Jouvenel
addressed this issue when speaking of the
ability of popular newspapers to awaken
emotion, building or destroying concepts
of right conduct. “From the day the first
ha’penny paper was launched until now,
the big-circulation newspapers have never
built up an ethic.”²³

In the concluding paragraphs of his
study, de Jouvenel writes, “It is impossible
to condemn totalitarian regimes
without also condemning the destructive
metaphysics which made their happening
a certainty.”²⁴ He asks, “What would the
individualists and free thinkers of the eighteenth
and nineteenth centuries say could
they but see what idols a man must now
worship, to what jackboot he must now
pay homage; would not the superstition
they fought seem to be the very acme of
enlightenment, compared to the superstitions
which have taken its place?”²⁵ It is
with reason that Pierre Manent called him
a “melancholy liberal.”

II

It was approximately sixty-five years ago
that the Austrian economist, F. A. Hayek
(1899–1992), published a short work entitled
The Road to Serfdom, a book perhaps
more relevant today than when it was written.
²⁶ The book is the result of Hayek’s
reflection on the socialist drift in Europe
that facilitated the rise to power of Hitler,
Mussolini, and Stalin. When the Anschluss
annexing Austria to Germany took place
in March 1938, Hayek was a lecturer at the
London School of Economics. Granted
British citizenship, he remained throughout
the war in England, where he continued
to teach until 1950, when he accepted
an appointment to the Committee on
Social Thought at the University of Chicago

Written while the outcome of World
War II was still uncertain, The Road to Serfdom
may be fruitfully read as an historical
review of the social and economic policies
that prevailed during the first decades of
the twentieth century, but that was not
Hayek’s primary purpose in writing the
book. It was issued as a prophetic warning,
yet as Hayek modestly writes, one
does not need to be a prophet to be aware
of impending disaster. “When one hears
for the second time opinions expressed
and measures advocated which one has
met twenty years ago, they assume a new
meaning as symptoms of a definite trend:
they suggest the probability that future
developments will take a similar turn.” He
continues, “It is necessary now to state the
unpalatable truth that it is Germany whose
fate we are now in danger of repeating.
The danger is not immediate, it is true,
and conditions in England and the United
States are still so remote from those we
have witnessed in Germany as to make it
difficult to believe we are moving in the
same direction.” ²⁷ Still, he complains, the
socialist policies endorsed by our “progressive”
intellectuals are the same as those
of the Twenties and Thirties that created
National Socialism.

Hayek was not alone in his analysis of
the past or in recognizing the danger that
the emerging socialist parties posed for the
future of Europe. As we have seen, writing
in France during the same period,
de Jouvenel produced a similar diagnosis
of the events that brought the European
dictators to power. De Jouvenel’s study of
power and its acquisition serves as a lasting
reminder that politics is about power.
“It is in the pursuit of Utopia,” de Jouvenel
writes, “that the aggrandizers of state
power find their most effective ally, [for]
only an immensely powerful apparatus
can do all that the preachers of panacea
government promise.” Hayek, however,
was engaged, much more so than de Jouvenel,
in a debate on economic planning
including Ludwig von Mises (a pupil of
Eugen Böhm-Bawerk), Joseph Schumpeter,
Michael Polanyi, Otto Neurath, Walter
Schiff, and Karl Popper.

It is significant that this debate focused
not so much on social policy per se as it
did on the method to be employed in systematically
arriving at sustainable social
policy. The remarkable advances in the
natural sciences in the late nineteenth and
early twentieth centuries, particularly in
theoretical physics, stimulated interest in
methodological and epistemological issues
normally discussed in the philosophy of
science. The positivism of the Vienna Circle
did not remain a merely philosophical
outlook but began to have an impact in
the social sciences.²⁸ The methods that had
proven successful in natural science were
deemed applicable to the sciences of man.
Economics was no exception. Positivism,
eschewing the metaphysical concepts
of nature and purpose in nature, limited
knowledge to sense-experience, to that
which can be empirically verified, thereby
reducing science to description and prediction.
Lost was a sense of an unchangeable
human nature, ordered to a discernible
end, that is, to self-fulfillment.

Given its ideological link to socialism,
positivism tended to divide political theorists
into left and right wings. Perhaps no
one has more succinctly shown the link
than the American political theorist, John
H. Hallowell, in his Main Currents in Modern
Political Thought.²⁹ This should be read
in conjunction with Ludwig von Mises’s
classic but lumbering 1922 volume, Socialism.
³⁰ Hallowell shows that once justice,
being a metaphysical concept, is discarded
as empirically worthless, freedom under
the law no longer means what the classical
liberal took it to mean. Traditionally it
meant that a man could not be compelled
to do anything contrary to reason and
conscience. Under the influence of positivism,
“freedom” came to mean that a man
could not be compelled to do anything
except by law enacted in accordance with
some prescribed procedure with sufficient
force behind it to compel obedience. From
the positivist’s viewpoint what the liberal
calls “rights” are merely concessions
granted by the state or society. Hallowell
concludes that if rights are the product of
law, they are not properly rights at all; they
are mere concessions to claims that the
individual makes and the state recognizes.
As such they can be withdrawn if the state
deems such withdrawal in the interest of
the general welfare. Hallowell insists:

There is a great difference between
freedom from unjust compulsion
and freedom from illegal compulsion.
Moreover, when the test of
legality is ultimately conceived as
the force behind law, freedom from
illegal compulsion amounts to no
more than freedom to do whatever
the state does not forbid. This is a
conception of freedom much more
congenial to tyranny than to the
preservation of the inalienable rights
of man.”³¹

Viewed from the perspective of positivism,
the rights of man are no longer to
be called “natural rights”; they are mere
“legal rights.” Hallowell reflects:

It was the liberal positivistic jurist
long before Hitler who taught (explicitly
or implicitly) that might makes
right and that rights are not attributes
which individuals have by virtue of
their humanity but simply claims
which the state may or may not
choose to recognize. Unwittingly,
it may be, such liberals prepared the
way for Lidice and Dachau.³²

Distancing himself from socialist planning,
Hayek provided his own perspective
on how a market economy is actually
driven. Most of the knowledge necessary
for running an economic system, he holds,
is not in the form of scientific knowledge,
that is, by a conscious allusion to
the principles governing natural and social
phenomena. More important is the knowledge
which may be described as intuitive
in character, idiosyncratic knowledge, consisting
of dispersed bits of information and
understanding relative to time and place.
This tacit knowledge is often not consciously
possessed by those who make
use of it, and it is of such a nature that it
can never be communicated to a central
authority. The market tends to use this
tacit knowledge, as do individuals pursuing
their own ends. Ludwig von Mises
had made a similar point in a 1920 article,
“Economic Calculation in the Socialist
Commonwealth,” wherein he wrote:

In the absence of a capitalist market,
production costs and commodity
values could not be determined. A
central planning board could neither
measure costs nor determine prices.
Prices reflect not inherent but changing
human preferences; they provide
producers and distributors necessary
information for planning production
and distribution. . . . It is precisely
in market dealings that market prices
are formed, taken as the basis of calculation
for all kinds of goods and
labor. Where there is no free market,
there is no pricing mechanism: without
a pricing mechanism there is no
economic calculation.³³

Karl Popper, like Hayek, was a student
of von Mises and from the start was critical
of the Vienna Circle, although in his early
years he could be described as a heterodox
socialist. Hayek badly shook Popper’s
progressivism, Hacohen tell us in his biography
of Popper. On reading The Road to
Serfdom, Popper in a letter to Hayek, called
it “one of the most important political
books I have ever seen.” To another correspondent
he wrote, “[Hayek] has seen very
much sharper than I have that socialism
itself leads directly to totalitarianism.”³⁴
Popper in his autobiography discloses that
he would have remained a socialist had
he not begun to see that socialism put
liberty at risk. In Hacohen’s judgment, it
was the Continent’s mass support for fascism
that gave him pause. Popper came
to the conclusion that “the paradox of
democracy was real: if the majority were
sovereign, then it could decide that it no
longer desired a democratic government.
It could, as a third of the German electorate
did, vote the fascists into power.”³⁵ It is
worth remembering that both Hayek and
Popper, though universally recognized as
social theorists, were initially interested in
epistemological issues normally encountered
in the philosophy of science. In fact,
when Hayek arrived at the University of
Chicago, he offered a faculty seminar on
the philosophy of science that was attended
by some of the most notable scientists of
the time, including Enrico Fermi, Sewall
Wright, and Leo Szilard.

In The Fatal Conceit, Hayek devotes a
timely chapter to “The Mysterious World
of Trade and Money,” wherein he speaks
of the shameless abuse of money by governments
and the disturbance in markets
caused by government interference. “The
history of government management of
money has, except for a few short happy
periods, been one of incessant fraud and
deception.”³⁶ With von Mises he was a
strong advocate of the gold standard. He
was convinced that society does not benefit from an artificial increase in the money
supply or the easy availability of bank
credit. Credit expansion by banks, in addition
to causing inflation, makes depression
inevitable by causing mal-investment, that
is, by inducing businessmen to overinvest
in higher inventories of capital goods.
Inflationary bank credit, when lent to businesses,
masquerades as pseudo-savings and
makes businessmen believe that there are
more resources available for investment in
capital goods production than consumers
genuinely command. Hence an inflationary
boom requires a recession, which
becomes a painful but necessary process
by which the market liquidates unsound
investments and reestablishes the investment
and productive structure that best satisfies consumer preferences and demands.
In the early 1920s von Mises and Hayek
developed this cyclical theory, warning that
the “New Era” prosperity of the period was
a sham and that its inevitable result would
be a bank panic and depression.³⁷ Contemporary
readers may find it unfortunate that
the von Mises-Hayek thesis has made no
lasting impression on American presidential
administrations past or present.

Socialism, considered abstractly, Hayek
concedes, may not inexorably lead to
totalitarian rule, but he is convinced that
experience shows that the unforeseen and
inevitable consequences of social planning
create a state of affairs in which, if
its policies are pursued, totalitarian forces
eventually will get the upper hand. Ironically,
he suggests, socialism can be put into
practice only by methods of which socialists
disapprove.³⁸ The Road to Serfdom was
written, Hayek repeats, in an effort to alert
his readers to the seemingly unstoppable
trend in Western democracies to subject
their national economies to central planning,
which he claims evidence shows will
inevitably lead to tyranny. Even a strong
tradition of political liberty, Hayek warns,
is no safeguard. The democratic statesman,
who from the loftiest of motives sets out to
plan economic life, will soon be confronted
with the alternative of assuming dictatorial
power or abandoning his plans.³⁹ In short
order he will have to choose between disregard
of ordinary morals and failure.

Hayek is convinced that the unscrupulous
and uninhibited, lacking principles to
constrain their activity, are most likely to
assume positions of authority. Under their
leadership, the moral views that initially
inspired the collectivist state are not likely
to prevail. The general demand for quick
and determined government action will
lead to a new morality and the suppression
of democratic procedures. Given dissatisfaction
with the slow and cumbersome
course of constitutional procedures, the
man or the party that appears the strongest
and seems the most resolute in getting
things done is the one that will set the
moral tone.⁴⁰

In a planned society it is not merely a
question of what the majority of people
agree upon but what the largest single
or homogeneous group agrees upon. It
takes such a core group to make unified
direction possible. Such a group, Hayek
believes, is not likely to be composed of
the best-informed and most-disinterested
elements of society. In general the higher
the education and intelligence of individuals,
the more their tastes will differ and
the less likely they are to agree on a set of
ideas. “If we wish to find a high degree of
uniformity and similarity of outlook, we
have to descend to the regions of moral
and intellectual standards where the more
primitive and ‘common’ instincts and
truths prevail.”

That said, if a political dictator had to
rely entirely on those whose uncomplicated
and primitive instincts happen to be
similar, their numbers would scarcely give
sufficient weight to his campaign. He will
have to increase their numbers by converting
more to the same creed. He must
somehow obtain support of the docile and
gullible who have no strong convictions
of their own but are prepared to accept a
ready-made system of values, provided it
is drummed into their ears loudly and frequently.
It will be those whose vague and
imperfectly formed ideas are easily swayed
and whose passions and emotions are readily
aroused who will thus swell the ranks
of the totalitarian party. ⁴¹ Absent a strong
bourgeoisie, the transition to a dictatorship
may be easy, swift, and accomplished with
complete legality.

Speaking of the mechanism by which
power is achieved; Hayek warns that
where there is dissatisfaction with the policies
of the ruling party, a skillful demagogue
can weld together a closely coherent
and homogeneous body of supporters by
calling for a new order. “It seems almost a
law of human nature that it is easier to get
people to agree on a negative program—on the hatred of an enemy, on the envy
of those who are better off—than on
any positive task.”⁴² Yet pandering to the
demands of a minority can lead to the dissolution
of democratic governance, for
democratic governance can work successfully
only so long as, by a widely accepted
creed, the functions of the state are limited
to policies where real agreement among
the majority can be achieved. The price
we have to pay for a democratic system,
Hayek insists, is the restriction of state
action to those areas where agreement can
be reached. Government interference in
the life of the citizenry, even for benevolent
purposes, endangers liberty if it posits
a consensus where none exists. Absent
consensus, coercion becomes necessary.⁴³

Examining the wellsprings of the
socialist mentality, Hayek believes that
the desire to organize social life according
to a unitary plan springs essentially from
a desire for power, much more so than a
desire for the communal good. In order
to achieve their end, socialists must create
power—power over men wielded by other
men, a perennial allure regardless of the
objective. The success of socialist planning
will depend on the achievement of power
over a reluctant citizenry. When economic
power is employed as an instrument of
political power, it creates a degree of dependence
scarcely distinguishable from slavery.
The separation of economic and political
aims, Hayek insists, is an essential condition
of freedom.⁴⁴

Throughout his long life, Hayek was to
return time and again to themes first articulated
in The Road to Serfdom, notably in
Law, Legislation and Liberty⁴⁵ and The Fatal
Conceit: The Errors of Socialism (cited earlier).
In the latter, published when Hayek was
eighty-nine years old, he professed to be an
agnostic with respect to the existence and
nature of God, but he had no doubt about
the classical and Christian origins of Western
culture, and he saw that with the eclipse
of Christianity, Europe was losing a force
for the good. In this work the connection
between property and liberty is reexamined
in the light of history. “The Greco-Roman
world,” Hayek writes, “was essentially and
precisely one of private ownership, whether
of a few acres or of the enormous domains
of Roman senators and emperors, a world
of private trade and manufacture.”⁴⁶ The
Greeks seem to have been the first to see
the connection between private property
and individual freedom. From antiquity to
the present, “no advanced civilization has
yet developed without a government which
saw its chief aim in the protection of private
property.”⁴⁷

“Where there is no property, there is no
justice” is a proposition as certain as any
demonstration in Euclid, Hayek maintains.
Why then do intelligent people tend
to be socialist?

Of course intelligent people will
tend to overvalue intelligence, and
to suppose that we must owe all the
advantages and opportunities that our
civilization offers to deliberate design
rather than to following traditional
rules, and likewise to suppose that
we can, by exercising our reason
eliminate any remaining undesired
features by still more intelligent
reflection, and still more appropriate
design and “rational coordination”
of our undertakings. This leads one
to be favorably disposed to central
economic planning and control that
lie at the heart of socialism.⁴⁸

Ignored by the “progressive” intellectual
is the fact that there are other and
more important elements at the root of our
civilization. To these there seems to be a
willful blindness. “How could,” Hayek
rhetorically asks, “traditions which people
do not like and understand, whose effects
they usually do not appreciate and can
neither see nor foresee, and which they
are still ardently combating, continue to
have been passed on from generation to
generation?” We owe it to our religious
heritage, Hayek concludes, that such beneficial traditions have been preserved and
transmitted. From a purely naturalistic perspective,
those traditions may be no more
than “symbolic truths,” but it has been and
remains the role of religion in society to
preserve our moral compass.

One must conclude that even at the
end of his life, in spite of certain Aristotelian
propensities, Hayek had not fully
escaped the positivism of Auguste Comte
and the Vienna Circle to which he had
been exposed in his early years. Lacking a
metaphysics, he remained confined to the
phenomenal order of description and prediction.
Still, like his mentor, Ludwig von
Mises, it is to Hayek’s lasting credit that he
has alerted more than one generation to the
main issue in social and political conflict,
which is “whether a man should give away
freedom, private initiative, and individual
responsibility and surrender to the guardianship
of a gigantic apparatus of compulsion
and coercion, the socialist state.”⁴⁹

NOTES

1. Rémi Brague, The Legend of the Middle Ages:
   Philosophical Explorations of Medieval Christianity,
   Judaism, and Islam, trans. Lydia G. Cochrane
   (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009).

2. Adrian Goldsworthy, How Rome Fell: Death
   of a Superpower (New Haven and London: Yale
   University Press, 2009).

3. Paul A. Rahe, Montesquieu
   and the Logic of Liberty (New Haven and
   London: Yale University Press, 2009).

4. Bertrand
   de Jouvenel, On Power: Its Nature and the
   History of Its Growth, trans. J. F. Huntington
   (New York: The Viking Press, 1948).

5. Pierre
   Manent, Democracy without Nations?: The Fate
   of Self-Government in Europe, trans. Paul Seaton
   (Wilmington, DE: ISI Books, 2007).

6. Paraphrased
   by Brogan, “Preface” to On Power,
   xvi-xvii.

7. Ibid., 11–12.
8. Ibid., 12.
9. Ibid.
10. Ibid., 157.

11. Ibid., 171.
12. Ibid., 11.
13. Ibid.
14. Ibid., 380.

15. Yves R. Simon, The Community
    of the Free, trans. Willard R. Trask (Lanham,
    MD: University Press of America, 1984).

16. Ibid., 149.

17. Ibid., 150: “The real question
    is whether democracy can lead to totalitarianism,
    whether a democratic regime can develop
    into a totalitarian regime, whether the democratic
    state may happen to work in such a way
    as to bring about the elimination of democracy
    and the establishment of totalitarianism.”

18. On Power, 261.

19. Richard Pipes, Property and
    Freedom (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1999),
    281.

20. Ibid., 229.
21. Ibid., 287.
22. Ibid., 288.
23. On Power, 373.
24. Ibid., 377.
25. Ibid.
26. F.
    A. Hayek, The Road to Serfdom (Chicago: University
    of Chicago Press, 1944). Because of a
    paper shortage in England, Hayek, with the aid
    of a friend, sought publication in North America.
    In the United States, the manuscript was
    turned down by three major publishers before
    it was accepted by the University of Chicago
    Press. Given a glowing review in the London
    Sunday Times Book Review, the initial printing
    of 2,000 copies was soon increased to 20,000.
    By the time the f iftieth-anniversary edition
    was issued, the book had sold 81,000 copies in
    hardback and 175,000 in paperback. Reader’s
    Digest had distributed an additional 600,000
    copies in condensed form.

27. Ibid., 4.
28. For a
    valuable discussion of the impact of the Vienna
    Circle on the economic and political theorists
    of the day, see Malachi H. Hacohen, Karl Popper:
    The Formative Years, 1902–1945: Politics
    and Philosophy in Interwar Vienna (Cambridge:
    Cambridge University Press, 2000).

29. Cf.
    John H. Hallowell, “Positivism” in Main Currents
    in Modern Political Thought (New York:
    Henry Holt & Co., 1950), 289–327.

30. Ludwig
    von Mises, Socialism: An Economic and Sociological
    Analysis, trans. from the 1932 German edition
    by J. Kahane (New York: Macmillan Co.,
    1945). Von Mises was writing before the full
    effects of socialism were felt on the Continent.

31. Main Currents, 225–26.
32. Ibid., 226.
33. Collectivist
    Economic Planning, ed. Friedrich Hayek
    (London: Routledge, 1935), 111.

34. Karl Popper,
    485.

35. Ibid., 507.
36. The Fatal Conceit:
    The Errors of Socialism in The Collected Works
    of F.A. Hayek, ed. W.W. Bartley III (Chicago:
    University of Chicago Press, 1989), 103.

37. Cf.
    Murray N. Rothbard, “Biography of Ludwig
    von Mises (1881–1973),” at www.mises.org.

38. Road to Serfdom, xliii.

39. Ibid., 149.
40. Ibid.,
    150.

41. Ibid., 152–53.
42. Ibid., 153.
43. Ibid.,
    291.

44. Ibid., 161.
45. Law, Legislation and Liberty,
    3 vols. (Chicago: University of Chicago
    Press, 1973, 1976, 1979).

46. The Fatal Conceit,
    29.

47. Ibid., 32.
48. Ibid., 54.
49. Cf. Ludwig
    von Mises, “Preface” in Bureaucracy (New
    Haven: Yale University Press, 1944).