There are several ways of writing history. One is to do it chronologically, with just enough reference to “influences” (economic, social, intellectual) to make events credible. Another way is to deal with “real” causes in depth, paying strict attention to the “scribblers” who, in John Maynard Keynes’ estimation, always control the actions of “statesmen” who may have quite forgotten the origins of what are all too often their obsessions. In this second type of history the “story line” of action may become tantalizingly blurred. But the mosaics, the intaglio work, invariably possess a fascination all their own.
Adam B. Ulam’s In the Name of the People: Prophets and Conspirators in Prerevolutionary Russia (Viking Press, 625 Madison Ave., New York, N.Y. 10022, 448 pages, $15.00) is an absorbing example of history-as-the-sum-of-intellectualinfluence. Reading it is an adventure in hardihood. The names of obscure contributors to forgotten publications such as Alexander Herzen’s The Bell or Nicholas Chernyshevsy’s The Contemporary come so thick and fast that one spends more time turning back the pages than one does in going ahead. It is as if one were reading recent British history in a detailed study of the tracts of the Fabian Society, which indubitably played a fundamental role in undermining an empire and bringing a whole middle class society to its knees. Or it is as if an American historian had chosen to tell us all about the New Deal by analyzing what was printed in the Twenties and early Thirties in the pages of The Nation and The New Republic, where George Soule, Rexford Tug-well and Stuart Chase, among others, expatiated on the idea of “the planned society.”
The late Joseph Schumpeter thought that capitalism would succumb to socialism not because of any intrinsic defects in the market system but because it could not hold the loyalty of intellectuals. But what Ulam shows is that intellectuals, if unemployed, will undermine any system. (The Solzhenitsyns will be the death of Communism yet!) Objectively considered, the decision of the intellectuals in late Nineteenth-Century Russia to use terroristic tactics in hopes of sparking a revolution that would establish a free federation of peasant communes stretching from Poland to Vladivostok was supremely stupid. The intellectual nihilists simply did not know the “people” for whom they professed to speak.
Alexander Herzen, no terrorist himself, held court and published his magazine in western Europe, where he was inevitably cut off from “firsthand knowledge” of his own country. When he left Russia in 1847 it was, admittedly, a “vast prison.” But “reform,” of sorts, would have come without the intercession of intellectuals who hoped to establish a Utopian combination of anarchism and socialism without first passing through a “western” cycle of parliamentarianism and capitalist development.
Nicholas I, in reaction to the unsuccessful revolt of December 14, 1825, had “sat on the lid” for thirty years, forcing intellectuals to become conspirators and infiltrators for want of open forums inside Russia. But after Alexander II came tothe throne in 1855, it was, as Ulam says, “a different Russia.” In his Once a Grand Duke, Alexander Michailovich Romanov, a nephew of Alexander II, describes his uncle as a nice and kindly man who, if the terrorists had left him alone, would have done much more for Russia than the circumstances of living under a perpetual state of siege permitted. Since the Grand Duke makes no bones about describing most of his relatives as incompetents, we may take him as a relatively unprejudiced witness.
An Impossible Situation
In any case, Alexander II was faced with an impossible situation. He had freed the serfs, but he couldn’t turn an illiterate peasantry into a nation of capable freehold farmers overnight. But neither could the young intellectuals who “went to the country” turn the ex-serfs into liberal Kropotkin anarchists who would, somehow, establish themselves in prosperous “fields, factories and workshops” without having recourse to village entrepreneurs who wanted something for themselves.
It was an impasse, but history would have provided an out if nihilists such as the psychopathic Nechayev had not intervened. As Ulam says, the nihilist and populist supporters of the Land and Freedom and the People’s Will conspiracies ignored the fact that there was “no such thing as the people.” Many ex-serfs lived as their medieval ancestors had done. But under Alexander II the “peasantry was already going through what the Marxists called class differentiation.” Some villages were on the threshold of the industrial age. There were “tight-fisted ones”—the kulaks—but there were also helpful self-made men who felt they had an obligation to those who worked for them.
Alas, the conspirators had no use for evolution as opposed to instantaneous transformation. The first attempt on Alexander II’s life, made in 1855, failed. But the rebels, fed by exiled propagandists such as Bakunin, persisted. The invention of dynamite was great help in making “elegant and slender bombs.” Finally, on their eighth attempt to kill him, the People’s Will conspirators, never more than a few hundred in number, managed to assassinate a Czar who still held the affections of many of the peasants whom, after all, he had freed with the stroke of a pen at a time when the United States was convulsed by the violence of the Civil War. It had taken the nihilists until 1881 to get a brave man.
Impending Revolution
Alexander III, the Romanov giant who succeeded to the throne, managed to scatter the conspiracy. But it was only for his short lifetime. The Grand Duke Alexander thinks that the premature death of Alexander III at the age of forty-nine in 1894 “advanced the outburst of the revolution by at least twenty-five years.” Nicholas II did not know how to cope with a history that included two disastrous wars, and he had a faculty for taking the worst possible advice. Alexander III, according to his nephew, would have had the good sense to avoid being drawn into the squabbles of western Europe.
The nihilists did nothing for Russia. But they did something for an émigré who took the name of Lenin. The Bolsheviks, like their forerunners in the People’s Will, believed in a small organization that presumed to speak in the name of the people, or, as Lenin preferred, the proletariat. But they had observed that assassination solved nothing by itself. The “objective circumstances” had to be right before a coup d’etat could be turned into a revolution. Lenin had what the nihilists lacked, an infinite amount of patience.
The really sad conclusion is that Lenin, like his terroristic intellectual forebears, had no real knowledge of human nature. He couldn’t understand the elementary point that without private ownership there is no protection against tyranny. Under Communism Russia is no better off than it was a hundred and fifty years ago, when Nicholas I ruled by repression. Indeed, it is worse off—the Bolsheviks have added torture to the repressive measures they learned from the Czars. As Max Nomad once said, the Kaiser and Czar were liberals when compared to Lenin and Stalin. The KGB and the Gulag have gone way beyond the Romanovs’ Nineteenth-Century Third Department, which never knew the depths of depravity that became routine in the totalitarian regimes of the Nazis and the Bolsheviks in the Twentieth Century of the so-called Christian Era.
ADAM SMITH: THE MAN AND HIS WORKS
By E. G. West
(Liberty Press, 7440 North Shadeland, Indianapolis, Ind. 46250)
254 pages.
Reviewed by Allan C. Brownfeld
This is certainly an appropriate time for the appearance of a new biography of Adam Smith. The same subjects which concerned him concern us now. Reading the financial pages of any contemporary journal, Adam Smith would find the debate about the merits and demerits of free trade and protectionism all too familiar. In the last 200 years, he would probably conclude, we have learned very little. He might also think to himself that had we consulted his works, we might have been spared many of our present dilemmas. In this, he would surely be correct.
This small and readable volume by Dr. E. G. West includes not only a review of Smith’s life and the world in which he lived, but provides us with an excellent summary of The Wealth of Nations. Dr. West, who is now Visiting Professor at the Center for the Study of Public Choice at the Virginia Polytechnic Institute, also restores to eminence an earlier work of Smith’s, The Theory Of Moral Sentiments. (The Theory of Moral Sentiments has also recently been reprinted by The Liberty Press; hardcover $9.95, paperback $2.95.)
Dr. West believes it more than coincidence that 1976 marked both the 200th anniversary of the publication of The Wealth of Nations and of the American Revolution. He notes that, “In many ways Adam Smith belongs to America as much as does Jefferson… Jefferson and Smith complemented each other in their work. Both men, for instance, shared the republican instinct; both argued strongly for liberty; and Jefferson’s plea for political liberty was well accompanied by Smith’s campaign for freedom to trade.”
Adam Smith understood 200 years ago what many economists and political leaders have not yet understood today. Dr. West writes that, “Smith ridiculed in particular the artificial barriers against trade between the two neighboring rich countries of France and England. Such restrictions, argued Smith, were the outcome of a quiet, domestic conspiracy between self-seeking tradesmen and politicians. He was the first to concede that the pursuit of self-interest was not intrinsically bad; what was needed was a system in which self-interest would be so harnessed that it would be an ally and not an enemy of social prosperity. In general, the private free market mechanism provided such a system. By pursuing his own interest, the individual frequently promoted that of the society ‘more effectually than when he really intends to promote it.’ ”
Smith was a vigorous defender of his philosophy of free trade and free markets. Many examples of this defense are presented by Dr. West. In one, Smith declared that, “By means of glasses, hot beds, and hot walls, very good grapes can be raised in Scotland, and very good wine too can be made of them at about thirty times the expense for which at least equally good can be brought from foreign countries. Would it be a reasonable law to prohibit the importation of all foreign wines, merely to encourage the making of Claret and Burgundy in Scotland?”
Dr. West also points out that Adam Smith believed in liberty as a principle, not as a “utilitarian” means of achieving worthy ends. It was the chief end in itself: “The `true’ lover of liberty values freedom for its own sake. The person who supports freedom only because it will have consequences that he approves of is not so committed. Smith was the ‘true’ libertarian…. One does not have to look hard through Smith’s writings to find liberty treated as a value absolute…. Again and again he reveals himself as an arch opponent of established oligarchies, entrenched aristocracies and oppressive religious establishments.”
Yet, it is also true that Adam Smith was not the ideologue that many of his most fervent followers have made of him. In this connection, Professor West points out that, “Prepared to consider exceptions to general rules, he was a careful advocate and not, like the subsequent writers in the Manchester School, an apostle of free trade. Indeed, in conceding that tariffs were in some circumstances acceptable, he provides an interesting ancestry of many modern economists who have developed what they call ‘second best’ arguments in favor of limited protectionism. Smith’s general conclusion, however, was that apart from the stated exceptions there was an underlying presumption in favor of free trade and that, generally, the onus was upon interested parties to prove otherwise.”
In many respects, the mercantile philosophy which Smith opposed in the 18th century is very similar to the “Keynesianism” of this century. Professor West states that, “Smith’s views on the national debt and unbalanced budgets in particular revealed the full vigor of his opposition to mercantilists…. In issuing debt, governments deprived industry and commerce of capital and thereby caused an increase of present consumption. This was to the detriment of accumulation and growth. Unbalanced budgets were a menace to liberty. Once the sovereign developed a taste for borrowing he would realize an increase in his political powers since he would no longer be so dependent on tax exactions….”
In Smith’s time, as today, the proposition that the national debt is not really a burden to the country but only an internal transfer was a basic argument used to support deficit spending. Smith explained that “because the taxes impoverished the private sources of revenue, land and capital stock, this led to the withdrawal of capital from the country by owners who had become irritated with ‘the mortifying and vexatious visits of the tax-gatherers.’ ”
It is too bad that we have learned few historical lessons in the years since Adam Smith shared his wisdom with the world. For this reason Dr. West’s biography seems to address contemporary men and women in terms of their own era. Perhaps if we rediscover Adam Smith, we can move in the direction of rediscovering the truths he so painstakingly sought to transmit.
THE RECONSTRUCTION OF THE REPUBLIC
By Harold 0. J. Brown
(Arlington House, 165 Huguenot St., New Rochelle, New York 10801, 1977) 207 pages.
Reviewed by Melvin D. Barger
Dr. Brown, a professor of theology at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School in Deerfield, Illinois, argues that the United States derived its strength, freedom, and cohesion from a system of biblical values now virtually repudiated. A system of humanistic values, sponsored by a wide range of opinion makers and thought leaders, has replaced the older religious values. But humanism is unable to maintain our individual and collective vitality and cannot give us vision and purpose. We have been weakened to such a point that the long-term survival of the United States as an independent, sovereign nation is now in question.
Dr. Brown is not a doomsday prophet, but he does show that the predominant values and ideas in a society determine its future conditions. If we face decline and destruction, it is only because we have chosen a faulty system of values and have turned away from belief in God. We can find new vision and new direction by recovering our former values.
“We must learn again to identify what is really wrong in our individual and collective conduct, and make that right,” Dr. Brown insists. “But we will not find our guides among those who are leading the way—the self-made ‘opinion makers.’ The answer is to return, consciously and with eyes open, to a fundamental truth of human nature, set down in the Bible and observed over and over again throughout history. Man’s life has a moral dimension, and he needs something more than the satisfaction of his merely physical ‘needs.’ That moral dimension, in a materialistic society, cannot be satisfied by the standard-bearers of materialism and hedonism. In other words, it cannot be satisfied by the mentality of autonomous man, publicized in his mass media and praised in his secularized intellectual and artistic circles.”
Even basic libertarian ideas have become sinister and have been misapplied in this new moral climate. Dr. Brown is particularly distressed by the way that the “freedom of choice” slogan has been used in the abortion controversy.
There are fundamental moral questions about abortion that disturb many people who feel that abortion is the taking of innocent life; but their opposition has been weakened by the slogan “freedom of choice.” The same slogan has also been extended, under the concept of “pluralism,” to undermine the older American traditions. Dr. Brown shows how a public school teacher can use pluralism as a pretext for teaching Marxism-Leninism in ways that would be strictly forbidden if the subject were Christianity.
As the older traditions and our religious heritage continue to erode, we are also losing the ability to maintain order, without which no society can survive. The only choices remaining are coercion or persuasion. If we go much further down the road of government control, Dr. Brown points out, there will soon be little left that we can recognize as personal freedom. He also argues convincingly throughout the book that the United States faces additional dangers in losing the will and strength to defend itself in a hostile world.
The answer to this general deterioration must be a religious one, Dr. Brown insists, and he believes that a restored republic can come only from restored self-consciousness on the part of enough citizens. “Unless the republic is restored,” he writes, “it will inevitably turn into a technocratic tyranny more extensive than any the past has known.” He says that those who are unwilling to agree to an articulated religious answer to our problem must face with all seriousness the question whether the society that we are building without religion is one that they can endure.
It is not likely that libertarians will agree with all of Dr. Brown’s arguments, and this reviewer feels that he occasionally displays self-righteousness and excessive zeal. Many committed Christians of more liberal faiths would agree with his major point that a new religious consciousness is needed, but they would have difficulty joining him in the pews. Perhaps it’s not necessary to do this, however, because Dr. Brown does show that our diverse religious backgrounds did produce a shared moral consensus based on biblical values. We may disagree on many matters, but it should not be hard to convince ourselves that we desperately need a new moral consensus—and that the hour for finding it is very late. Dr. Brown’s book is highly recommended for those who wish to join the search.
