MR: Will the failure of Borders change the way the book business thinks of books?

RN: What does a person do when they want something to read? One of the big mistakes that often gets made in publishing is we focus a lot on price. We focus on how much a book costs and we decide whether it’s worth it or not. Now we’ve got a lot more books that are absolutely impoverished. The reality is that people’s decision-making process has a lot more to do with time than with money. It’s 15 hours in the inside of your head. Books are so cheap compared to the hours of entertainment they provide. The problem is, do they provide entertainment? Is it in fact a book you want to read? If after four hours you hate it, what most people say is “I can’t believe I spent fifteen dollars on this.” But what they really mean is “I can’t believe I just wasted four hours of my life on this.”

MR: Red Lemonade allows people to view free of charge complete manuscripts of books you have for sale. You’ve mentioned that having access to the full text online will help readers make up their minds and commit to buying a hard copy. This view differs from a general reluctance of publishers to post complete works online.

RN: Exactly. With the vast majority of books, the problem that most people have is they don’t know whether it’s going to be worth their time to read it. There are a tiny handful of books, in the case of each person, where they can be sure they want to read them. The reality is that I don’t think, in fact, there are a huge number of people reading our books for free online that have made a decision about whether to buy it. I mean there is probably a small number that are doing it for that reason and that number may increase, but I believe the number is smaller than has occurred to people because publishers refuse to do it. But what we’ve very clearly demonstrated by putting it for free online is that reading the book online has absolutely no negative impact on sales. Why in fact would it?

In many respects we’ve got a real Stockholm Syndrome around the model of publishing as it’s existed up until now. We just take for granted that it is the way it is because that’s a good way for things to be. And when something diverges from it we look for proof as to why it should diverge. But I’m interested in trying to reframe questions. Why do we think that a person won’t buy a print book because in theory they could read it for free online? What is it that people are buying? What is it that people want? In many respects what people want is to read it on their own terms, so in many cases, people don’t want to have to read it on a screen. Then the other thing is that people want to feel like they are spending money. It is their way of feeling good about themselves. It is their way of voting for something with their dollars.

The full interview is well worth your time.

“My notion of a Whig, I mean of a real Whig (for the Nominal are worse than any Sort of Men) is That he is one who is exactly for keeping up to the Strictness of the true old Gothick Constitution.”

– Sir Robert Molesworth, Preface to Francois Hotman, Franco-Gallia (as cited in Trevor Colbourn’s The Lamp of Experience.)

I remain skeptical about all of this: even if it’s true that books produce that feeling among readers in general, and not just among a subset of hard-bitten bibliophiles, will a younger generation that has grown up with electronic reading devices feel the same way? And do feelings usually trump economic considerations? The comparison I’ve drawn in the past is to poetry: in part for economic reasons — poetry can pack more meaning into fewer words, and hence fewer pieces of vellum or man hours of copying — poetry was once exalted and popular (at least among the relatively few people who were literate). Now, in an age when expansive expression is encouraged by cheap paper and even cheaper pixels, poetry is relegated to a very narrow commercial niche, and the form itself has arguably decayed as it has lost currency. Poetry still claims to make an appeal to feeling that prose cannot match, but it turns out that vanishingly few people are willing to pay for that feeling.

Gordon is realistic about what economics and technology will wreak:

Physical books will surely become much rarer in the marketplace. Mass market paperbacks, which have been declining for years anyway, will probably disappear, as will hardbacks for mysteries, thrillers, “romance fiction,” etc. Such books, which only rarely end up in permanent collections either private or public, will probably only be available as e-books within a few years. Hardback and trade paperbacks for “serious” nonfiction and fiction will surely last longer. Perhaps it will become the mark of an author to reckon with that he or she is still published in hard copy.

… One technology replaces another only because the new technology is better, cheaper, or both. The greater the differential, the sooner and more thoroughly the new technology replaces the old. Printing with moveable type on paper reduced the cost of producing a book by orders of magnitude compared with the old-fashioned ones handwritten on vellum, which comes from sheepskin. A Bible—to be sure, a long book—required vellum made from 300 sheepskins and untold man-hours of scribe labor. Before printing arrived, a Bible cost more than a middle-class house. There were perhaps 50,000 books in all of Europe in 1450. By 1500 there were 10 million.

He should give up hope that appearing in print will be the mark of the serious author. How long has it been since the ability to versify was the mark of a serious author? About 200 years. As mass-readership books — “romance fiction,” etc. — go out of print, the demand for books in general shrinks, and the remaining books that are produced will cost much more. As the price rises for serious books, demand can be expected to fall further. Even “serious” authors are interested in being read as widely as possible — I get lobbied regularly by authors who want their magazine articles to appear online. There’s little reason to think that 20 years from now serious authors will demand that their work appear in print: indeed, just as poetry fell prey to self-indulgence on the part of poets once it ceased to be audience-oriented, so the last holdouts in print can be expected to be the vain and cranky. That too will exacerbate the plight of book.

What would stave off extinction is for books once again to become affordable; while wood pulp may never be as cheap as electrons, books could be more affordable than they are now. But all of the institutional economics of the publishing industry point in the other direction: as the market shrinks, publishers will raise prices, producing a death spiral.

I don’t take pleasure in writing any of this: my home and office are lined with books, and as others get out of pulp, I’ll continue to acquire more of it. But wishful thinking and idle invocations of fireplaces — how many readers actually have one of those? — won’t save publishing.

But there’s a bigger question beyond whether or not pulp will survive: what about the book as a form? Here there are reasons not only to be unsentimental but perhaps to toast extinction. The book is simply the wrong format for many literary works, and its decay creates at least the possibility of a better form arising.

Think about biography. Is the typical popular biography at book length, some 200 to 400 pages, really superior to a far shorter biographical essay by, say, John Morley? Is longer inherently better? The Hellenistic poet Callimachus thought not: he’s famous, among other things, for the maxim “mega biblion, mega kakon” — a great big book is a great big evil.

The market for big books has long crowded out other literary forms, in particular the essay. Yes, you can have books of essays, but there are fewer and fewer of those: publishers hate them because they don’t sell. But a long-form essay, of the length that Morley used to write may be the most suitable form for popular non-fiction of many kinds. I can’t be sure of that; perhaps the readers really do demand 200 pages of content, in any format, and not 100 or 85. But I suspect the economics and mechanics of the book market have much to do with the relative neglect of the essay. The Victorian essay is too long for most magazines, but too short to justify the expense of publishing as a standalone book. Devices like the Kindle and iPad make the form economical again for the first time in a century — at least, economical as far as the medium is concerned. There’s still the problem of whether the form can provide enough revenue to make it worth a writer’s time.

But look at what’s happening to album sales as a parallel case: most iTunes sales are of individual songs, disaggregated from albums. An essay is not a disaggregated chapter of a book, but it’s the literary analog of a pop-music single. The ideal length for such a piece of writing is something that will only become clear over time; magazine articles are probably too short to seem like worthwhile standalone purchases, unless they sell for just a few cents. But essays could sell for substantially less than electronic books and still seem like discrete, satisfying products. It may also be more enjoyable to read something essay-length, rather than book-length, on an e-reader.

I like the essay as a form, so this is an avenue of speculation down which I’m always happy to wander. But quite apart from whether the essay could be the successor to the book, there’s good reason to think something other than book-length narrative will emerge as the preferred form for electronic texts. At least, I can’t see a reason beyond the constraints of the physical medium and the structure of the publishing and retail industries why every topic worth writing about at length must be worth writing about at a length of 100,000 or so words. (Consider this, too: a Morley essay is something one might re-read several times over the years. Even a reasonably good nonfiction book is something most people are only going to want to read once — there are exceptions, but how many?)

The decline of the physical medium of the book is a great shame, but the rise of formats other than the 200-page tome for serious nonfiction holds great potential. Many of the better sort of nonfiction books would be better still shorter, and too short can’t be short enough for the worse sort of nonfiction, the politicians’ and actors’ autobiographies. Take a look at the New York Times hardcover bestsellers list and you can’t help but see a brighter side to the death of print.

There’s a good deal of irony in the contrast between the free-spending “conservative” Reagan and the frugal “liberal” Jimmy Carter, who as Diggins rightly notes “was as antistatist as Reagan” and accomplished much of the federal deregulation—removing entry barriers in air travel, trucking, and other fields—for which Reagan would sometimes receive credit. While both the left and the right have made Reagan out to be a great scourge of government power, Diggins demonstrates that the president’s rhetoric was more anti-statist than his actions. Reagan’s conservatism, too, was not what his admirers and detractors often claimed that it was; the religious right flourished in the 1980s, but Reagan—a divorced, socially tolerant movie star—hardly embodied it. Both Carter and Reagan’s successor as governor of California, the former seminarian Jerry Brown, were much more traditionally Christian (and more fiscally parsimonious) than Reagan, who “opened the American mind to optimism and innocence, leaving it closed to sin and experience.” Reagan, a believer but not much of a churchgoer, “seemed to offer a Christianity without Christ and the crucifixion, a religion without reference to sin, evil, suffering, or sacrifice.”

Read on.

A reader on @TAC thinks I’m too kind to Reagan in the Buckley review. The litany of bad policies and personnel choices under Reagan is lengthy: the federal government grew and the executive branch became more secretive and less accountable; the neoconservatives gained a permanent foothold in the GOP; Reagan’s judicial appointments were often flawed; the U.S. pulled out of Lebanon but became more enmeshed in Third World proxy warfare; the drug war escalated; etc. For the case against Reagan, see Murray Rothbard, as well as Peter Hitchens’s TAC review of The President, the Pope, and the Prime Minister: Three Who Changed the World.

On the other hand, while conservative movement hacks regularly overestimate Reagan’s contribution to the end of the Cold War, his critics continue to underestimate that contribution. A relative of mine who was no admirer of Reagan interacted with Eastern Europeans quite a bit in the late ’80s and early ’90s. The Poles and Czechs and East Germans certainly did feel a debt to Reagan, even to the point of naming their children after him. He was the first American president in a generation who did not equivocate about the evils of socialism and the Soviet empire. The nations of what had traditionally been Central Europe had seen their sovereignty signed away by Roosevelt and Truman at the Yalta and Potsdam conference. Reagan seemed to repudiate those concessions.

He did so without starting World War III or, what was a greater risk, eliciting a Soviet crackdown. He took fire from the neoconservatives and movement cons for his negotiations with Gorbachev — which were not always as friendly as they are popularly remembered as being — but Reagan successfully de-escalated the Cold War in Europe while giving moral support to the captive nations. That Reagan did both of these things is astonishing: had anyone else been in office, the one should have undermined the other. Think of Gerald Ford asserting in debate with Jimmy Carter, “there is no Soviet domination of Eastern Europe.” Republicans could, as Nixon did, “go to China,” but in doing so they appeared to be surrendering the moral high ground. Reagan was firm and flexible in exactly the right proportion, and it was no accident. He genuinely believed that communism was evil — a term that doesn’t carry much weight in realpolitik — and he genuinely believed that people longed to be free and were basically good. The former was a conservative belief, the latter a liberal one. Both proved to be indispensable at the moment when he was president. (I should note, by the way, that Peter Hitchens’s piece in the March 2011 issue of The American Conservative is essential reading, especially for those who think that history had a simple happy ending once the Soviet empire fell — the corruption and post-communist forms of despotism that took root throughout much of the former USSR after 1991 attest to the darker side of history.)

At home as well, Reagan accomplished an historical remoralization — not in the sense of renewing morality, but in restoring morale. That has entailed a mixed legacy: Americans, especially conservatives, began to reaffirm markets over Great Society (if not New Deal) planned and the country became more entrepreneurial. We entered a new era, one in which the dominant political tones would be those of neo-liberal economics. Cutting taxes and growing the economy came to take precedence over creating new government services — at least, rhetorically they did. In practice, Leviathan continue to grow during Reagan’s years and afterward, and new kinds of economic insanity flourished, above all the now pathological Republican belief that economic growth is a freedom-preserving panacea. Reagan was not, in fact, as much of a neo-liberal as his epigones — as Jeff Riggenbach has pointed out, he was actually more of a protectionist than the presidents on either side of him. But even if Reagan’s policies had a Buchananite tinge to them, the worldview that predominated on the right after the Reagan era was one of free-trade agreements and open borders. And beneath this neo-liberal veneer, neo-imperial foreign-policy views proliferated, thanks to the neoconservatives that Reagan brought to government and to the exceptionalist and democratist rhetoric Reagan himself employed. On the other hand, it should be remembered that Reagan also had Buchanan and other traditional conservatives in his administration. The president hardly handed power directly to the neoconservatives.

Reagan’s foreign policy in Europe and toward the USSR was a success of world-historical proportions — again, not because he brought down the Berlin Wall or the Soviet Union, but because he encouraged the Europeans who did tear down the wall, and he avoided the grandiose military-strategic blunders of Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon (as well as Bush, Clinton, Bush II, and Obama). His foreign policy elsewhere was mixed, but again not catastrophic, which is actually saying a lot. At home, his policies were also mixed and he sowed seeds that would bear terrible fruit in the Great Recession. Letting those seeds grow into entangling weeds, though, is something for which Clinton and Bush II deserve more reproach. Reagan was the right man for his time and place; the trouble is that once he had left office his Emersonian optimism was turned into a hard and cynical neo-liberal statism by his successors, both on the right and in the Oval Office.

You can catch an earlier interview of mine with the Daily Bell here. There’s also this radio interview with Jack Hunter from last week — a commenter says its from my Glenn Beck range, presumably because it references the progressives. Beck is half-right about the progressives, for what it’s worth. (Gottfried tackles his wrong half here.)

Somewhat to my surprise, I stumble into 2011 with three or four essays of mine in bound form. There’s the new piece “Willmoore Kendall, Man of the People” in The Dilemmas of American Conservatism, three previously published items in the invaluable antiwar reader ComeHomeAmerica.us, and a personal piece originally from LewRockwell.com in Walter Block’s anthology of libertarian autobiographies, I Chose Liberty.

Next month I’ll be delivering a paper on Kendall’s and M.E. Bradford’s views of Lincoln — with excursions into Jaffa, Strauss, and Richard Weaver — at the ninth annual Abbeville Institute scholar’s conference. This year’s gathering takes place in Wilmington, N.C., and has as its theme “The South and America’s Wars” — specifically, Southern opposition to those wars. Student scholarships may still be available.

He begins with the attempt, apparent in Machiavelli and carried through by Hobbes, to separate politics from the Church. With Locke, liberalism turns away from pessimism and creates a benign view of man’s nature; man now acts not out of fear of death, but desire for gain and convenience. As an antidote to the danger that Lockean majoritarianism poses to the very rights Locke wanted to protect, Montesquieu (borrowing from Bolingbroke) suggests that the representation of popular sovereignty be divided between two institutions, the legislature and the executive. At this point, civil society and the individual have been separated from politics; they are free to pursue whatever they wish. Rousseau finds that this, however, only reveals an unbearable new problem, a schism within the individual psyche. The individual thinks only of himself in his relations with others, but incessantly compares himself to others in reflecting on his own worth. Society, meanwhile, has become an unguided mass of resentments and jealousies and weighs heavily on the individual.

To overcome this misery, Rousseau proposes the integration of the individual, the state, and society through the General Will; this will bring about a total transformation, a revolution, in human nature and in every institution. Rousseau doesn’t specify much of the content of the General Will or show what this revolutionary transformation will look like, but two points I should underscore are that a.) it’s not necessarily left-wing communitarianism that best exemplifies what Rousseau was trying to achieve, and b.) Rousseau has in practice not emancipated the fictitious General Will but will in general: every alienated individual can now believe that the solution to his personal problems lies in political and cultural revolution along the lines of whatever ideology he believes in.

Rousseau was no liberal but he prepared the way for new kinds of liberalism that would adopt his emphasis on equality and his method of remaking human nature through socio-political revolution. Manent explains that liberalism after Rousseau has reversed Hobbes: the author of Leviathan began with a state of nature in which man could only be delivered from the bloody condition of equality — every man being equally liable to be killed by his fellows — through the creation of the state. But over time, advanced liberals came to dream of the state leading us to a blissful condition of equality, in which the state itself would whither away. For Hobbes, brutal human nature requires the construction of Leviathan; for the liberal after Rousseau, a gentle but all-pervasive state is necessary to refashion human nature. That’s what progress means.

Manent is very good at explaining how the liberal state that emerges after the French Revolution is simultaneously weaker than and stronger than society — weaker in that society is now the ultimate medium of human satisfaction and public opinion (and its manipulation) becomes increasingly influential over the state; stronger in that the state becomes more pervasive and interferes in areas of life never before subject to power. Having first divided religion from state and state from society, liberalism ends up reuniting them on new terms. Public opinion — in suitably interpreted form, of course — becomes the new religion and holds the sword of state.

Post-revolutionary liberals such as Constant and Guizot recognized what dangerous forces Rousseau had unleashed. For Constant, neutralizing the danger meant turning to a liberalism of opposition that kept will divided and skeptical in government and directed the transformational urge toward literature. For Guizot, opposition, criticism, and irony could not be enough; liberals must reassert the independence of the state from the opinion of society. Tocqueville, meanwhile, examined what happens when democracy, an outgrowth of late liberalism, is taken to its furthest expression. He found that while democratic liberalism might be acidic to old forms of community, without a tutelary power to provide for human needs, atomized individuals would be forced to create new kinds of community. Should there be a centralized state to obviate the need to rediscover community, however, atomization could proceed much further — with all the attendant anomie, restlessness, and revolutionary desire that moderate liberals feared.

This synopsis may make Manent’s book sound rather ordinary, but what makes it a tour de force is how elegantly he reveals the connections and undertones in this straightforward narrative. Manent problematizes liberalism effectively, which leads to many interesting questions.

In typing up some notes about the book and Googling around for related items, I returned to a blog post of Patrick Deneen’s from 2007 in which he asks whether classical liberalism, modernity’s “first wave” (as Strauss conceived it), ineluctably leads to the second- and third-waves of modernity (historicism, relativism, nihilism — the point I would stress is that it’s not merely a theoretical -ism that poses the danger here, but real practices and habits of thought. Think of the imperial will unleashed). If Strauss is correct about this inevitable sequence, then liberal conservatives who attempt to preserve classical liberalism — and free institutions such as the U.S. Constitution — are at best wasting their efforts. At worst, they may be supporting the very source of the later “waves” they wish to turn back.

Certainly traditional conservatives have seen the rot of liberalism setting in long before Rousseau critiqued and radicalized it. Looking at Manent’s account, isn’t the will essentially unfettered as early as Locke? Whether or not Locke entertained notions of total, Rousseau-like revolution — Deneen notes that Locke does goes so far as to question even the authority of parents over children — the legislative supremacy he proposes to uphold men’s rights could quite easily become a means by which willful people might attempt to remake themselves and their society. What Montesquieu recommends as a remedy may only add to the problem — instantiating popular sovereignty in an executive as well as a legislature means that diffuse “will” has been given the only effective outlet it can have, a single actor. The stage is set for a demagogue who claims his own will is the perfect reflection of society’s will. As Manent observes in passing, a single will can represent the idea of will (anybody’s will) much better than can a fractious group.

Deneen, I think, is immediately concerned with the dissolution of the social order and the loss of truth, but it’s worth keeping in mind that these things are not just changes in human feelings or lamentable social trends. Anomie is only the beginning; what follows is the attempt to overcome it by force and will.

This, unfortunately, is where reactionaries or radical conservatives meet their doom. If liberal conservatives are on the side of modernity’s first wave, radical conservatives look and sound a lot like men swept up in modernity’s second and third waves — they turn into Rousseau, except that where Rousseau idolized the past but believed it irretrievably lost, the reactionary or radical conservative thinks that liberalism can and should be extirpated completely, allowing a reconstruction of Christendom or some other golden age — Rome, Sparta, the Teutoburg Forest. A passage from Irving Babbitt that I recently spotted, in a 1929 Saturday Review of Literature essay titled “Benda and French Ideas,” makes the point. Benda, says Babbitt approvingly, “has taken issue not only with the modernists, but with many of the enemies of modernism … and is unable to see that ‘integral nationalism’ of the type promoted by L’Action Francaise is genuinely Catholic or classical. Rousseau would, as a matter of fact, have the right to say (in the words of Emerson’s Brahma) of many of those who profess to be reacting from him: ‘When me they fly, I am the wings’.”

I would contend that Burke, whom Strauss considered a first-wave liberal, actually avoids the extremes of a self-defeating liberalism or a self-aggrandizing radicalism. Burke may begin as a liberal conservative, a moderate Whig, but he becomes something else after his encounter with the French Revolution, moving simultaneously “backward” (by reaffirming the pre-liberal institutions of church, state, and family while amending popular sovereignty) and “forward” (by embracing history as the medium of political validation — this is something Manent discusses that would take too long to explain here; suffice it to say that history comes to play after Rousseau a role once played by philosophy). He continues to be “liberal” in that he doesn’t imagine returning to a confessional state, but he now affirms the pre-liberal as well, and uses the “post-liberal” medium of history to reconcile these apparently irreconcilable elements — history shows the persistence of tradition, as well as breaks as philosophical revolutions. The liberal world of modernity has not completely lost the pre-liberal traditions of Christendom (and to some extent the classical world), even if modern philosophers have moved very far from them.

The Burkean position is hardly unassailable, but I think it derives great strength from recognizing a need to reconcile, in a dynamic fashion, these pre-liberal, liberal, and post-liberal elements. “Reconcile” may be too strong a word: keeping them from destroying one another would be a start. The Burkean thus may have to scale back first-wave liberalism as well as second- and third-wave willfulness, but he does not attempt, as the reactionary does, to scrap liberalism in a counter-revolution that will bring about the personal and social fulfillment that the epigones of Charles Maurras desire at least as much as the followers of Rousseau. It’s perhaps characteristic of the Burkean conservative that he does not think a much more integrated personality is possible in this era, but just as Burkean politics might keep the tidal forces of liberalism from ripping society apart, Burkean conservatism may provide an analogy for the kind of mindset needed to face modernity’s discontents.

Burkean lessons apply to the United States in a complicated way. On the one hand, I think Deneen is correct that there’s a certain logical progression from constitutionalism to the willful socio-politics that we have today. (Note, by the way, that nothing better illustrates how Rousseauvian America has become than a supposedly Christian president’s aide asserting that “We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality.”) Constitutionalism is not only feeble in response to the demands of modern man — it amounts to saying, “Don’t want what you want, just want the law” — but to some extent it actively demolishes the pre-liberal institutions and habits that could resist tide. On the other hand, for all its flaws and whatever its defective tendencies, constitutionalism is not identical with the politics of will, and in some respects it restricts the progress of will. That is, even if there is a logical progression from constitutionalism to, say, Caesarism, it may be the case that without constitutionalism Caesarism is reached even more quickly. The challenge for the Burkean is to strengthen the virtues of the constitutionalist tradition while looking beyond it — and behind it — to the older habits and ideas that can patch its defects.

The Dilemmas of American Conservatism, which includes my Kendall essay, will be out next month from the University of Kentucky Press. Meanwhile, out now from the Mises Institute is Strictly Confidential: The Private Volker Fund Memos of Murray N. Rothbard, which features Rothbard’s take on Kendall (along with such other notable figures as Charles A. Beard, George Kennan, and Eric Voegelin). As one might expect, Rothbard does not find Kendall’s ideas congenial: on the contrary, as Rothbard sees things, “Kendall has set forth the philosophy of tyranny cogently” and “the Kendallian doctrine is the Enemy.”

The Kendall material in Strictly Confidential comes from a 1956 report Rothbard wrote on the Yale professor’s Buck Hills Falls lectures, which previewed many themes that would subsequently be worked out in The Conservative Affirmation and various Kendall essays. Rothbard tends to agree with Kendall’s criticism of government by experts, which Kendall sees as characteristic of modern liberalism, but he is utterly opposed Kendall’s alternative, an unbridled majority rule — indeed, something that could be called majoritarian dictatorship. Rothbard considers Kendall’s thought to be even more antithetical to libertarianism than the ideas of Russell Kirk and the “New Conservatives” of the 1950s:

Kirk is the philosopher of old pre–Industrial Revolution, High Anglican England, the land of the squire, the Church, the happy peasant, and the aristocratic bureaucratic caste. He is essentially and basically antidemocratic. Kendall, on the contrary, is, as I have said, the patron of the lynch mob—he is an ur-democrat, a Jacobin impatient of any restraints on his beloved community. He hates bureaucracy, but not as we do, because it is tyrannical; he hates it because it has usurped control from the popular masses. He is the sort of person whom the [Clinton] Rossiter-[Peter] Viereck “new conservatives” are combating, for they are trying to defend the existent rule of the leftist bureaucracy against any populist mass upheaval. So they—the leftists—have shifted from mob whippers to soothing conservatives.

Kendall not only argues that a majority should get its way in politics; he goes so far as to argue that the Athenian public was right to condemn Socrates to death, indeed it had a duty to do so, for the alternative would have been either to accept Socrates’ teachings (which the Athenians were not prepared to do) or to treat the fundamental questions that Socrates raised as matters of indifference. Rothbard’s criticism extends Kendall’s doctrine ad absurdum, arguing that any innovation that would change a community must, on Kendall’s account, be forbidden by the majority. Otherwise the community would be surrendering its own identity to a subversive element.

How fair is all of this? Kendall was certainly no libertarian. But he was not the totalitarian that one might think from some of his more provocative statements. Rothbard does not draw out the connection between what he finds agreeable in Kendall — the criticism of modern liberalism as a covert form of domination over the public by an ideological elite — and the majoritarianism he finds objectionable. For Kendall, political power is a given; whatever scruples anyone might have about the use of force, and whatever written laws may be in place, ultimately somebody is holding a sword. Modern liberalism is not the tolerant, peaceful thing it claims to be because its political order is still based on conformity and force; the sword is wielded by a expert class that disguises its dominance over everyone else with empty language about rights. (To the extent that anyone actually believes that language, even within the expert class, they are putting their own necks under the sword’s edge.)

Various political thinkers have argued that different classes, castes, or factions should wield the sword. Kendall, however, sees a straightforward categorical division: either the majority wields the sword, or some minority, a special interest of some sort, wields it. Kendall, following his interpretation of Locke and the American political system, believes that the majority should wield power. (Later, Kendall’s views will become more complex: he continues to hew to majoritarianism, but he becomes critical of Locke and draws a distinction between different kinds of majority rule — a bad, plebiscitary kind, and a good, structured kind that he identifies with the best parts of the American tradition.)

Kendall would see Rothbard’s idea that everyone should adhere to a framework of liberty derived from property rights (including self-ownership) as irrelevant to political theory. Kendall also might not like the Rothbardian credo, but his personal preferences can be separated from his philosophy, and it seems to me the more important Kendallian philosophical point is that no ideology of rights or rearrangement of institutions eradicates power from human life. In a Kendallian view, Rothbard’s anarcho-capitalism can just as fairly be called a dictatorship of the property owners as Kendall’s majoritarianism can be called a dictatorship of the majority. The “dictator” in either system need not be sadist; indeed, he could be an enlightened despot, full of the milk of human kindness and absolutely determined to harm no one. But ultimately someone is holding the sword, and it is the sword-holder’s disposition that determines how much liberty or license other people may have. Kendall is not totally indifferent to liberty: he does, however, believe that ordinary people will have the best judgment of what liberty should mean and that ordinary people as a whole will tend to have less tyrannical impulses than any minority faction.

In this, Kendall more or less explicitly affirms what he considers to be John Locke’s “latent premise” — Locke can be a majoritarian and a believer in natural rights, according to Kendall in John Locke and the Doctrine Of Majority-Rule, because he tacitly assumes that the majority can be trusted to abide by those rights. Kendall and Rothbard are both Lockeans — even the later Kendall, who repudiates Locke himself, still retains some “Lockean” characteristics — but of very different species: Rothbard emphasizes a natural-rights Locke, Kendall a majoritarian Locke.

There are plenty of problems with majoritarianism, beginning with the question of just how “majoritarian” it actually is. Isn’t talk about majority rule just a disguise for rule by another kind of elite, much as talk about human rights and tolerance is? I don’t recall Kendall tackling this question head on, but I suspect that beyond whatever confidence he puts in democratic political machinery (which was sometimes quite a bit, especially where the U.S. Constitution was concerned), he might also see a strong cultural component in the desire and ability of a government to express the popular will. His interest in Rousseau (who seems also to have such a thing in mind) suggests as much. (Kendall translated and wrote introduction for The Social Contract and The Government of Poland.) In any case, there is plenty of cause for skepticism about the merits of majority rule, but it’s worth keeping an open mind about whether Kendall’s absolute majoritarianism is as incompatible with broad view of liberty as Rothbard thought.

An anarcho-capitalist society, after all, might well decide not to tolerate communists proselytizing on private property. (And if there is no public property, that means not tolerating communist speech at all.) Indeed, Hans-Hermann Hoppe insists on this point in Democracy: The God That Failed:

As soon as mature members of society habitually express acceptance or even advocate egalitarian sentiments, whether in the form of democracy (majority rule) or of communism, it becomes essential that other members, and in particular the natural social elites, be prepared to act decisively and, in the case of continued nonconformity, exclude and ultimately expel these members from society. In a covenant concluded among proprietor and community tenants for the purpose of protecting their private property, no such thing as a right to free (unlimited) speech exists, not even to unlimited speech on one’s own tenant-property. One may say innumerable things and promote almost any idea under the sun, but naturally no one is permitted to advocate ideas contrary to the very purpose of the covenant of preserving and protecting private property, such as democracy and communism. There can be no tolerance toward democrats and communists in a libertarian social order. They will have to be physically separated and expelled from society.

Thomas Jefferson, of course, notoriously wanted to ban certain Tory books, including Hume’s History of England, from the University of Virginia’s libraries. The point I would make is that in any community, whether democratic or anarcho-capitalist or what have you, somebody is going to be drawing lines dividing permissible opinions from speech acts that endanger the society order. One might choose to be far more latitudinarian than Kendall, Hoppe, or Jefferson, but don’t confuse latitudinarianism with the belief that one’s own limits upon expression aren’t really limits at all. Liberals, Kendall and Rothbard would agree, say they are committed to complete free speech when in practice they are not; but more than that, even someone who sincerely believes in total expressive freedom has probably just failed to recognize his own innate beliefs about where limits should be drawn.

The question of what limits should exist is both distinct from and intimately connected to the question of who should rule. Only the “ruler,” in the abstract, is able to establish the limits (and the conversely the freedoms) that he wants to see in society. The questions that Kendall raises, and the sometimes extreme form in which he poses them, should be helpful to anyone who wants to think seriously about political philosophy. They are questions that even a Rothbardian must confront, even if the answers he comes up with are very different from Kendall’s.

Give your imagination permission to engage with some unlikely facts: in the 1950s, the USSR was one of the growth stars of the planetary economy, second only to Japan in the speed with which it was hauling itself up from the wreckage of the war years. And this is on the basis not of the official Soviet figures of the time, or even of the CIA’s anxious recalculations of them, but of the figures arrived at after the Soviet Union’s fall by sceptical historians with access to the archives. The Soviet economy grew through the second half of the 50s at 5%, 6%, 7% a year. As Paul Krugman has mischievously pointed out, the USSR’s growth record in the 50s elicited exactly the same awed commentary as Chinese and Indian growth does today. Admittedly, “growth” did not mean exactly the same thing in the Soviet context that it did in, say, the American one (average for the period 3.3% a year) or in the British one (average: 1.9%; have a stale crumpet). Soviet growth was counted differently, was biased massively towards heavy industry and did not necessarily imply a matching growth in living standards.

Eventually, even the Politburo itself realized that for all the resources the USSR could mobilize, mass prosperity would continue to be elusive. That’s where cybernetics comes in:

All of the perversities in the Soviet economy that I’ve described … are the classic consequences of running a system without the flow of information provided by market exchange; and it was clear at the beginning of the 60s that for the system to move on up to the plenty promised so insanely for 1980, there would have to be informational fixes for each deficiency. Hence the emphasis on cybernetics, which had gone in a handful of years from being condemned as a “bourgeois pseudo-science” to being an official panacea.

Could the best mathematical minds in Soviet Russia — which is to say, probably the best mathematical minds in the world — make up for the absence of price signals in a Communist economy? No. But the attempt, and all the reasons why it failed, is the stuff of a very interesting story. Certainly the Guardian excerpt, and James Meek’s review, make Red Plenty sound like a fascinating read.

There’s more good news for the not-neocon Right: today I unexpectedly received in the mail a two-volume edition of all six series of H.L. Mencken’s Prejudices, which is coming out in September from the Library of America. This is the first time in a long while that the complete Prejudices has been conveniently available. HLM biographer Marion Elizabeth Rodgers has overseen the new edition. (Here’s my review essay of her Mencken: The American Iconoclast.)

See Jeff Taylor’s recent TAC article “States’ Fights” for more on the politically incorrect truth about nullification.