Spencer Heath Archive

Item 1432

Carbon of a letter from Heath to John Chamberlain, Time and Life Magazines, Rockefeller Center, New York City

June 13, 1945

 

 

 

Dear Mr. Chamberlain:

I remembered your suggestion, when we were at break­fast in Washington at the Dodge Hotel, that if I would write a reply to Lawrence Frank’s long article in the Saturday Review of Literature you might be able to use it or its substance as a basis of an interview with me. I have accordingly set out my negative reactions to Mr. Frank’s article and cast of thought on the several typed pages that I enclose herewith.

I will be glad if you can use this material in the way you suggested. You will notice that my comments are wholly critical. Mr. Frank’s article does not afford a substantial basis for constructive criticism nor for any positive exposition of the much abused social order in the practice of which the modern world has been trans­formed and the span of life so greatly enlarged. My current reflections on this, occasioned by my examination of Frank’s article, I have kept in separate notes.

With high personal regards,

Sincerely,

 

You have the copy of SRL containing Mr. Frank’s article.

 

Flight from Freedom

Recent literary events are significant. The Uni­versity of Chicago Press, in The Road to Serfdom by Professor F.A. Hayek, takes time out to post a well-timed warning against the lures and enchantments of the totalitarian Utopia. Reader’s Digest breaks precedent and prints a brilliant condensation of Hayek’s warnings as its leading feature. Book of the Month Club issues some millions of copies in pamphlet form. Self-styled “liberals,” the pink prophets of protectionism, and perfectionism by laws, almost pause to give thought; and The Saturday Review of Literature opens its front pages to a fourteen column article by Lawrence K. Frank in attempted disparagement of the position and premises whence Hayek’s warnings proceed.

The bane of governmentalists, the legislationists, is their profound pessimism. They are blind to the pro­cesses within the social heritage and to much that it has, so far, attained. They are acutely conscious only of the conflicts, of the violences and strains, carried over from barbarism, perpetrated and perpetuated by govern­ments, that the social organism has not yet transcended and outgrown. Oblivious to society’s growths and its gains, they count all or most as loss and exhibit the characteristic primitive infantile reactions to their frustrated sympathies and desires. But their secret urge is to rule and control. They confuse sympathy with purity and righteousness, become moral avengers, and thus are self-endowed with an exalted motivation to rule and destroy. Calling themselves “liberals,” they are out not to give of their own, but to take from others; not to serve but to rule and master other men, all whom they think less righteous and more unfeeling men than they. To do this there is but one effective instrument and power: the sovereign state. Not to society but to government goes their appeal. If there is a wrong it must be righted by law. The sovereign state, the men who for the moment are supreme in power, can do no wrong. Sovereignty, especially popular or accepted sovereignty, is sacrosanct.

It is a cold fact for the attention of those calling themselves realists that sovereignty is the enforced mastery of men by other men. At all levels of action its technique rests on coercion; from its oppression of citizens or slaves to its supreme activity as the sole agency of war. Sovereignty is physical and not social. That is why governments have physical limitations, boundaries and frontiers. There are no social frontiers. In theory government has power only to protect and to serve; in cold fact and practice it is to tax and destroy. Yet it is the most cherished and most popular of all superstitions that a body of citizens, all the members of any large community, must first be taxed and ruled in order to be publicly served.

State stands for status; sovereignty means servitude; a strong state means a weak people; its ultimate corre­lative is slavery. The greater its power the less its responsibility. It takes from the oppressed many or it takes from the opulent few, and gives to the privileged few. Whom the state directs it cannot protect. Freedom it does not and cannot create but only confines and destroys. Peoples feed governments, maintain them out of their subsistence, and in wars protect them with their lives. Governments never protect anything but themselves, their sovereign powers. There are no other powers to whom liberty can be lost. Despite all its propaganda, freedom is always from government, never by means of govern­ment. History stands witness to this basic truth in every age. Yet supposedly educated minds are still too dull to heed. With the lure of a pigsty pottage, a glorified slave-pen existence, under the deceptive tinsel of, “ social security,” they would decoy whole peoples, sheep-­like, deeper and deeper into the totalitarian net.

When there is a call to council, if not to arms, when there is voice among all the murmurs of fear and doubt, such a voice as that of Hayek’s in The Road to Serfdom, then those who pander to the sheep-like weak­nesses of men are shocked and pained.

Lawrence K. Frank’s five pages published in The Saturday Review of Literature illustrate perhaps the best and the most that can be said against Doctor Hayek’s warning. He says that from the standpoint of assuming that the psychological quality of men who conduct enterprises mainly, at least, by the mutually selective tech­nique of voluntary contract must of necessity be inferior to the personal qualities of the “self-disciplined individuals” to whom at the end of his article he would en­trust the planned political administration of what he calls our “amazing new resources for human conservation.”

Mr. Frank is patently a scholar. He is highly literate in the language and traditions of other writers, reflects them with a liberal hand, quite complaisant towards their obvious confusions and contradictions, from whence he assumes, “These shifts in economic think­ing show that most of our classical economic theory is but an elaborate metaphor and the assumption of an economic ‘system,’ as a part of nature is gratuitous and misleading.”

Having thus virtually denied that there is in nature any such thing as an economic system, he proceeds in his very next sentence to add to the scholarly confusion by declaring the existence of a number of them, to wit:

“Moreover, the cumulative observations on other societies, built upon different cultural traditions, with their peculiar assumptions and values, show that each society has its own economic “system,” its historically developed institutions and practices and arrangements.”

Here we have, besides the contradictions, the fine literary admission that all is confused and misleading. Yet after some further paragraphs of unkind commentary on the personal characteristics of “those who want to do what they please in business and industry” he proceeds with his own gratuitous assumptions as to a social order as follows:

“As the evidence increasingly shows, social order is not given as a part of nature; it is not a system or mechanism out in space. Social order is in man; it is that which man himself creates and maintains by what he believes and assumes, what he has selected in nature and human nature for cultivation and elaboration (and has rejected or ignored). Social order is man’s self-chosen design for living; what he values and how he feels toward himself and other members of the group are directive in his conduct and so constitute his social order. Social order is not given; it must be achieved. It can be maintained by self-disciplined, responsible conduct of each member of society who can and will respect the rights and needs of others. This is what we mean by a free democratic society which for its continuation de­mands the highest standard of individual and group ethics, not submission to mythical forces or powers. If indi­viduals are to be accorded freedom of action, speech and belief, the power to contract and to engage in self-chosen activities, then, of necessity they must observe in their individual and group activities, in their personal re­lations and professional practices, the ethics which will make such freedom compatible with social order and our enduring human values and our persistent aspirations toward human dignity.”

Here we at least discover that the social order is in man; also that it must be achieved, but we are not told what it is. If it is to be achieved, it must be something not within man, but among men. Whatever it is, we are told that it can be maintained in either of two ways: by authority of the ruler, the state, or “by self-disciplined responsible conduct of each member of society,” and that in either case (apparently optional, as Mr. Frank sees it) if individuals are to be accorded freedom of action they must observe “the ethics which will make such freedom of action compatible with social order.”

Passing the obvious circularity of thinking, we find Mr. Frank sitting on both stools. On the one he sits with the “planners” who would enforce their idea of a social order by brute power of the state. On the other he sits with Dr. Hayek who purposes to depend on the responsible conduct of each member of society (not of the state) who can and will respect the rights and needs of others. This is indeed equivocal. Mr. Frank tells us that this latter is what we mean by “a free democratic society which for its continuation demands the highest standard of individual and group ethics,” yet this he in no way defines.

Dr. Hayek finds freedom in the impersonal contractual processes of the market. This is precisely where and only where we do witness the responsible conduct of each member of society who can and will respect the rights and needs of others. One wonders if Mr. Frank thinks no standard of individual and group ethics is practiced or prevails in the marts of trade. How otherwise does he think we have achieved any social order and progressed thus far? Would he prefer to have the market governed and its functions performed by the elected denizens of the City Hall?

Mr. Frank goes into moral and emotional tailspins by assuming the identity between the “impersonal forces of competition,” the system of voluntary contracts and balanced exchanges that constitute the market — and the highly personal eccentricities of certain neurotic indi­viduals who he says struggle ruthlessly against each other in “seeking to dominate and exploit social life for their own personality needs.”  Yet he cites Dr. Hayek himself to prove that these are precisely the individuals who, so far from submitting to the “impersonal forces of competition,” are through devious methods “interfering with the forces of competition” by resorting to the brute power of the state to establish cartels and other forms of privilege and monopoly by the hand of government, wholly subversive of competition and leading to its oppo­site, the wholly planned system of the totalitarian state.

Mr. Frank mixes his categories when he tries to make Dr. Hayek seem an apologist of precisely that aban­donment of competition and resort to the arbitrary, per­sonal and invidious monopoly power under authority of the state against which he so gravely warns. It seems little short of malicious to suggest that Dr. Hayek’s book is being promoted by those neurotic irresponsibles who, as Mr. Frank admits, are doing all they can to destroy competition by the establishment of state monopoly powers in their private behalf. This in itself is an example of the social perversions habitual to every type of governmental power with which the otherwise free demo­cracy of the market is beset. Mr. Frank’s article dis­plays enormous literary agility. He runs with the hare and hunts with the hounds. In the end he vanishes up an­other road. Of this he tells us nothing; only that it is not the road to serfdom nor is it the one down which “Sammy runs.”

Dr. Frank’s first thesis is, in effect, “it can’t happen here.” He tells us that the national planning and totalitarian regimes cited and warned against by Dr. Hayek have sprung up only in lands that had no such traditions of freedom as England and the United States. He states that those policies of national planning and the coercion and regimentation of all activities were accepted by the people generally (a few dissenting) as an expression of their ideals. Yet he assures us that in our freer Western lands current proposals for the same kind of governmental control proceed from a quite opposite set of traditions and ideals and will therefore, so he argues, lead to entirely different results. He relies on these traditions expressing other “beliefs and intent” to save us from the results that have come to other peoples from the same proposals and policies going into effect. With them regimentation is accepted because those people never believed in or expected anything else. We, how­ever, can accept it without menace to our liberties be­cause we have come to conceive government not as an authoritarian power, which it certainly is if it governs, but as an agency for the common good, to be invoked when people need help, protection and assistance.  This, he asks us to believe, is the American and English liberal tradition! — that government is the self-sacrificing Good Samaritan that comes to the relief of people who need help, protection and assistance and binds up their wounds when they have been robbed and abused.

Mr. Frank reflects the very antithesis of the Amer­ican or democratic tradition and ideal. It is the ideal of all slavish peoples, the ideal of Asia and of Continen­tal Europe, and especially the ideal or ideology of those parts that are least Western and most Asiatic — the homelands of this kind of ideals. He ignores the obvious fact that throughout history it is only by governments that peoples have ever been systematically robbed and abused. Men aspiring to freedom have never had anything else against which to contend or prevail. Defense against the encroachments of government, not seeking relief and protection under it, has always been the duty — the necessity — of men who would be free.