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.

Adair was evidently unhappy with his place within the profession. He never published the great book his friends expected of him; he regretted that academia valued mediocre monographs over brilliant articles, of which Adair wrote more than a few. (See Fame and the Founding Fathers for proof.) He was a superb editor as well, who at the helm of the William and Mary Quarterly turned that journal into the flagship publication in early American history. Although he chose not to revise and publish Intellectual Origins during his lifetime, he derived from it material that would go into several illuminating essays.

Intellectual Origins was in part a response to Charles Beard and his Economic Interpretation of the Constitution of the United States, which in the 1940s still colored the way historians saw the founding. Adair, like Forrest McDonald after him, did not simply discard Beard’s approach — the idea of considering the Founding Fathers’ economic interests still had some merit — but placed renewed emphasis on ideas as motive forces. Adair’s Founders were possessed by their reading of classical literature, with Aristotle, Tacitus, and Polybius informing their understanding of politics at least as much as John Locke did. Adair was also one of the first scholars to draw careful attention to David Hume’s influence upon the Founders, particularly Madison, who borrowed many of the elements he was to weave into Federalist 10 from Hume’s “Of the First Principles of Government,” “Of Parties in General,” and “Idea of a Perfect Commonwealth.” In Adair’s telling, insights drawn from Hume allowed Madison to break away from cliches about “mixed government” and the need for republics to be of small scale. Hume showed that a large republic could encompass a variety of interests that would check one another (a view for which Madison found support in Voltaire’s observation that England had freedom of religion because of its multiplicity of sects) and that a sufficiently indirect form of popular government did not require as a check upon democracy a “permanent will” of the sort that Hamilton wished to institutionalize in an American king and life-tenure Senate.

Hamilton suffers at Adair’s hands, presented as a man whose ideas were hopelessly out of phase with his times. Indeed Hamilton was, in the words of Gouverneur Morris, “more a theoretic than a practical man.” But for Adair, he was the prisoner of his classical reading, anticipating at any time the eruption in America of bloodshed between rich and poor on the scale of the stasis in Corcyra during the Peloponnesian War. Here one might dissent somewhat from Adair: Hamilton was hardly the only one who entertained such visions, and as Adair acknowledges he need not have looked back to Thucydides for illustrations of revolutionary violence. The Wilkes movement in England had at times threatened to become civil and class war, and only failed to do so because Wilkes was a libertine rather than an ideologue. Historian Iain McCalman has noted that the Gordon riots of 1780 “visited more destruction on London in a week than Paris experienced throughout the Revolution.” These incidents were nowhere near the level of internecine strife that Thucydides describes, but they might reasonably have smacked of a foretaste of things to come.

Be that as it may, Hamilton’s kingly hopes were certainly impractical in post-revolutionary America, and a modified version of Madison’s plan prevailed at the Philadelphia convention. One of the surprising things about The Intellectual Origins of Jeffersonian Democracy is how tightly Adair focuses on Madison, almost to the exclusion of Jefferson. But Madison was the architect of the constitutional system that made the Revolution of 1800 possible. Because the Constitution did not establish a mixed government, the Federalists had nowhere to turn — no repository for their “permanent will” — once Jefferson and Madison had outmaneuvered them at the ballot box. (The Federalists did pack the judiciary, but judges were not supposed to be government.) The Constitution had been flexible enough when “loosely” construed to allow Hamilton to erect his program, with George Washington as de facto monarch and the Treasury secretary as prime minister. But as Adair describes it, Hamilton was undone by his own success: he created a narrow cultural and financial elite with a vested interest in “high toned government,” yet in the process he also fostered a broad base of opposition, which Jefferson and Madison marshaled. Would-be kingly and aristocratic elements lost out to popular forces in what was, after all, a more popular than fixed system.

Adair is very good at drawing out the tension in Madison’s mind. On the one hand, the Virginian had come to a post-classical understanding of faction and interest that led him to a pluralistic (and national) political theory. On the other hand, he remained convinced that sooner or later the classical struggle between the poor many and the rich few would re-emerge as a result of concentration of population in cities. He subscribed wholeheartedly to the “yeoman farmer” ideal, both on account of his experience as a Virginian and from his reading of Aristotle, who had described small landowners as having a compelling interest in limited government:

They may subsist comfortably by labour, they would soon be ruined by idleness; they contrive a government, therefore, which requires as little expence of time as possible; and employ on all occasions, when it is practicable, the great machine of law to save the labour of man … Among such a people, government is carried on without salaries, without revenues, and without taxes. The affairs of the community, therefore, are left to assume this natural order; since men have no undue motive to engage them to abandon their own profitable concerns, in order to employ themselves in matters which will be much better managed without their unseasonable interference.

(Adair quotes John Gillies’s delightful 1787 edition of Aristotle’s Ethics and Politics. A later edition of the same translation is online here.)

America would not remain agrarian, however, and with industrialization would come class differentiation. Mixed government along the lines Polybius ascribed to Rome, with aristocratic and monarchical institutions (or approximations thereof) checking popular impulses, was the traditional solution to the problem of irreconcilable classes. Each permanent interest would have some institutional representation, and properly mixed the elements would balance. The poorer majority would not be able to expropriate the wealthier minority, but the former would have some say in government to protect them from depredation by the latter. Or so the theory went. What Madison did in proposing pluralism as a check on faction was revolutionary — he substituted a mixed people for a mixed government. The institutions of government would all be fundamentally popular, but in a tiered and filtered system.

Intellectual Origins doesn’t mention the national veto over state legislation that Madison wished to give Congress, but its purpose was also to ensure protections for minorities, even at the state level, against majority faction. Adair explains what majority faction had meant in the states prior to the Philadelphia convention: legislatures had in many instances acceded to majority pressure to issue paper money as a way of alleviating debts — or defrauding creditors.

“The Ancients were surely men of more candor than We are; they contended openly for an abolition of debts in so many Words, while we strive as hard for the same thing under the decent and specious pretense of a circulating medium,” Adair quotes William Grayson writing to Madison. “Montesquieu was not wrong when he said the democratical might be as tyrannical as the despotic, for where is there greater act of despotism than that of issuing paper to depreciate for the paying debts, on easy terms.” Though it might seem that small farmers would benefit from debt cancellation, Madison’s agrarianism did not lead him to inflationary populism. On the contrary: the Virginia elite’s experiences with heavy agricultural debts to British merchants had made Madison and Jefferson averse to debt in the first place. They prescribed private and public fiscal discipline, not printing-press bailouts, as remedy for the evils of debt.

A question that needs to be asked about Madison’s ingenious large-republic pluralism, however, is what it takes to sustain such a design. Pluralism should not be taken for granted as a natural condition; some arrangements are necessary to produce and maintain it. At first glance, the greatest threat to plurality of interests within a large republic might seem to come from the centralization of power, yet there are other, less direct but perhaps more pervasive, dangers. Pluralism, by scattering and diversifying interests, is meant to prevent intractable majority-minority dichotomies from arising. But a number of binary oppositions nevertheless proved to be very powerful in the antebellum republic: polarizations between Hamiltonians and Jeffersonians, North and South, free and slave states, frontier and coast, manufacturing and farming. And political parties would prove, both before and after the Civil War, to be adept at aggregating such polarities into intense partisan dualities — Federalist vs. Republican, Democrat vs. Whig, and Democrat vs. Republican, etc. Adair points to an irony:

James Madison and his friend Thomas Jefferson organized a majority party that coalesced across state lines and so was able to force its will on electors even twice removed from the people. How a situation arose in which Madison was forced to subvert his own electoral method must be discussed later. In theory, at least, he never refuted the ideal he shared with Hume, of sifting the popular will.

When I read this, I thought of a passage in Patrick Deneen’s essay “Counterfeiting Conservatism” in the current TAC:

Princeton political scientist Henry Jones Ford warned that the direct primary might take power out of the hands of party chiefs, but it would not result in a paradisiacal people’s democracy. … He foresaw the replacement of party operatives, who had historically chosen candidates on the grounds of local circumstance, experience, and party loyalty, with a “plutocracy” of monied interests that would increasingly be needed to finance expensive primary races. … The plutocracy of which Ford warned tends to reward candidates of ideological purity as they most neatly reflect a set of nationally defined partisan priorities.

There you see both the re-emergence of the economic divide that Madison feared and, perhaps more important, the consolidation of national ideological conformity against local, pluralistic interests. Even before the advent of the primary, political parties served the dangerous function of compiling grievances into national polarizations, undercutting the diverse, states-oriented federation that the Philadelphia convention seemed to envision. Yet it must be said that at the same time as parties aggregate these divisions, packaging them finally as “us” against “them,” they also tame them, channeling (for example) social or economic conflicts into political symbolism. The result of this is both a partisan dualism that nationalizes debate and a peaceful but continual consolidation of power in the central government to which both parties are appendages.

In short, binary oppositions can smash the Union, as they did in the Civil War, but they can also strengthen the Union in the worst ways. The whole scheme of pluralism is defeated when these dualistic forces either grow to national proportions of their own momentum or are assembled into national programs by political parties. If pluralism is a balance, the rise of binary oppositions upsets the balance in either an “anarchical” (in the bad sense) or tyrannical direction.

A diversity of small-scale institutions is the means of maintaining pluralism on the large scale, and the intermediary institutions beloved by traditional conservatives fit this bill. But again, one cannot take the health and survival of these institutions for granted. If they disintegrate, the foundations of constitutional pluralism are undermined. From above, these institutions are menaced by national power. From below, they are threatened by atomization, an entropic individualism that breaks down small-scale institutions into a homogenized mass of elementary particles. Not only are individuals cut loose from institutions unlikely to be able to mount the kind of power necessary to resist encroachments from above, but the decay of civil society may leave a hunger for “community” that national power (or nationalism) swoops in to fill. Robert Nisbet has described this risk in The Quest for Community and elsewhere.

The Madisonian system, then, is jeopardized from three directions: from consolidated national power, from binary oppositions that take on national proportions, and from social entropy. All of these are potent forces, and even if they chip away at constitutional pluralism only gradually, over time they will still destroy the edifice.

Does pluralism have any defense? Patrick Deneen has been willing to contemplate “subsidizing localism.” But this calls to mind a warning from Nisbet in his 1978 essay “The Dilemma of Conservatives in a Populist Society”:

The same rush to Washington, D.C. for handouts or participation in the power structure is to be seen elsewhere: in the universities and schools; in the churches – eager for some new tax exemption or to promote some new welfare reform; in the labor unions; in just about every sector indeed of American society. The family is important: there must, therefore, be a plethora of Federal laws and agencies protecting women and children. The local community is important: there must, therefore, be a vast community redevelopment act passed by Congress and an appropriate bureau established. So it goes. Given present currents, one has the sense that if the move toward decentralization and localism did become major, it would culminate in some new Federal Bureau or Department, doubtless titled “Department of Decentralization and Localism.” But I am being cynical. The dilemma of the conservative is, however, a very real one. The great question that must be faced and answered by conservatives is that of the relevance in our time of such values as the family, neighborhood, locality, religion, social rank, voluntary association, and, alone making these possible, limited political government.

An attempt to use federal power to shore up local institutions would inevitably be co-opted by the political parties and the central bureaucracy itself. This has certainly been the case with federal programs intended to alleviate poverty or help families. The highly localist Black Power movement eventually became a colony of federal power. The Religious Right has suffered the same fate. These movements had goals seemingly as radical as those of today’s Front Porch Republicans. But they played the federal game, and it played them.

A more effective approach might be to arrest the forces of decay. This would entail resisting partisan attempts to compose national-scale polarities, while rejecting ideologies of consolidation and critiquing social atomism. There is a positive as well as negative aspect to this: devolution as a political program, regardless of the substantive results of devolution; affirmation of literary humanism and local ways as counterweights to homogenization — this is the kind of “cultural conservatism” that’s most needed — and, in the denial of party-think, the preservation of independence of mind and conscience. A book like Intellectual Origins can put all of this into perspective: Adair’s work is of enduring significance for the light it casts not only upon the origins of Jeffersonian democracy, but on the prospects for republican ideals today.

The Fifth Amendment had stipulated that “no person” shall be deprived of property “without due process of law.” The Fourteenth Amendment repeated this, but with the provision directed specifically against “any State.” Now the ingeniously simple formula was to define a corporation as a “person,” whose property under the Fourteenth Amendment was then not subject to deprivation by any State without due process of law. In practice this meant that any regulatory action by the states could be appealed to the Supreme Court, which thus gradually replaced them as guarantors of property rights. As described by Charles A.Beard: “before the end of the nineteenth century the once almost sovereign powers of the States over property and business within their borders were reduced to mere shadows of their former greatness.”

By a logical extension of the corporate person argument the railroads, again for instance, soon found it expedient to apply to national instead of State courts, under the interstate commerce clause. That procedure brought the granting of injunctions against strike action, the violation of which in turn resulted in summary imprisonment of labor leaders, without jury trial, for contempt of court. Thus the national development of industry on the one hand, and of trade unionism on the other, led through the channel of the Fourteenth Amendment to the nationalization of governmental power and the resumed weakening of federal structure. Business leadership, too “practical” to theorize on politics, welcomed this centralization of power as long as it seemed to favor laissez-faire at the expense of labor organization. There was all too little anticipation that, in the name of democracy, this favoritism would eventually be reversed.”

That’s taken from Morley’s Freedom and Federalism. His chapter “The Fourteenth Amendment” elaborates the story. Morley is not, of course, arguing that he’d like to see businesses or individuals deprived of their property or rights in a lawless fashion at any level. But the structure of government matters as well as its content, and the combination of a liberal reading of the Fourteenth Amendment with the concept of corporate personhood wrought tremendous changes in the way governments works, in its scope and machinery. Power fled the people in the states and was absorbed and amplified by the institutions of the federal government — first by the Supreme Court, to a lesser extent by Congress, but ultimately and to the greatest extent by the executive branch, whose agencies, in the name of rights, can now seize property (the DEA), kill (the CIA), interfere in business (the FTC), censor communications (the FCC), and manipulate elections (the FEC) with nary a thought to “representation” or the legislative process. The corporate state turns out to be the executive state — which probably in the end becomes the military-security state. We’re not there yet, but we’re well on our way.

But Henry Hazlitt was there, and it turns out he was Buckley’s source, as a letter now online at the Foundation for Economic Education’s website shows. Buckley didn’t quite get the specifics down as Hazlitt remembered them, but the gist was right. Here’s Hazlitt’s account:

The incident did not occur at the dinner table, but later. As host, I had taken orders for drinks and was bringing them to the living room. As I entered, Ayn was saying to Lu: “You treat me like an ignorant little Jewish girl.” I had not hear what Lu had said, but I bravely started to patch things up: “Oh, I’m sure, Ayn, that Lu didn’t mean it that way.” Lu promptly jumped up and said: “I did mean it that way.”

Lu’s hearing was not good. I suspected at the the time, and have been convinced since, that he had misunderstood one of Ayn’s remarks.

One indication is that in ten minutes or so everything had quieted down. Another is that on no other occasion did I know Lu to be personally rude to anyone. (Argumentative, yes.)

Long afterwards, Ayn Rand and Lu Mises showed that they admired each other. Ayn continued to preach “selfishness”; but now in deference to Mises she added insistence on the need for “human cooperation.” She did this with no sense of inconsistency.

A few years after that dinner party — which must have been close to forty years ago [Hazlitt's letter is dated March 13, 1982] — meeting Ayn, I said: “Lu Mises and I were talking about you the other day. He called you, ‘the most courageous man in America.’” “Did he say ‘man’?” Ayn asked eagerly. “Yes,” I assured her. She was delighted.

So there you have the source of the other another legendary Mises-Rand anecdote as well. And good for Rand for taking Mises’s quip as a compliment.

Recalling the regimes of Walpole, Metternich, Melbourne or Louis Philippe (only more so), with a blend of indifference, benign neglect and a liking for amenities and comforts, the capitalist state must have sufficient hauteur not to want to be bothered by petty disputes among its subjects. The more quietly they get on with their business, the better, and it may occasionally, and a little reluctantly, use a heavy hand to make them do so. Its distance from the mundane concerns of its subjects does not, on the other hand, imply the sort of heroic hauteur which a Nietzsche or a Treitschke wished to find in the state, which reaches out for some high purpose, risking in avoidable war the life and property of the subject; nor the hauteur of utilitarian ethics, which sees the subject and his property as legitimate means to a greater common good. In a seeming paradox, the capitalist state is aristocratic because remote, yet with enough bourgeois overtones to recall the governments of the July Monarchy of 1830-48 in France. At any event, it is a state which is very unlikely to be a republic.

All this criticism of republicanism, by the way, should not be taken to mean that I don’t appreciate Jefferson, or even Machiavelli. Neither republicanism nor democracy is exactly the right term for the thing at which I’m taking aim — it’s more basically the idea that man creates his own law and that politics should should express human will. To some extent, politics as what Oakeshott called “enterprise association” or “teleocracy” is unavoidable. But that’s something to be discouraged as much as possible, and some political arrangements and philosophies encourage teleocracy more than others. The great merit of the U.S. Constitution, for all that it centralized and expanded power, is that it’s nonetheless nomocratic and can be used to thwart teleocratic drives.

You can see from this passage in Corey Robin’s review some of the intriguing avenues for Hobbes research:

And that, in Skinner’s suspenseful retelling of how Hobbes came to this understanding of freedom, is the purpose of Hobbes’s effort: to separate the status of our personal liberty from the state of public affairs. Freedom is dependent on the presence of government but not on the form that government takes; whether we live under a king, a republic or a democracy does not change the quantity or quality of the freedom we enjoy. This separation had the dramatic effect of making freedom seem both less present and more present under a king than Hobbes’s republican and royalist antagonists had allowed.

… it’s also clear from Hobbes and Republican Liberty and Skinner’s other writings that he believes the Hobbesian view of liberty has persisted in the writings of Constant, Isaiah Berlin and the tradition of what is now called negative or minimal liberalism. Unlike the robust liberalism of John Dewey, which suggests that anything less than complete democracy in the public and private spheres poses a threat to individual freedom, negative liberalism focuses on a narrower range of abridgments: being “prevented by other persons from doing what I want,” as Berlin puts it, when there is “deliberate interference of other human beings within the area in which I wish to act.” Freedom, to Berlin, is the absence of interference, and, in a nod to Hobbes, he writes that it “is not incompatible with some kinds of autocracy, or at any rate with the absence of self-government.”

Skinner also has suggested that the republican account of liberty has lived on in the democratic movements of the nineteenth century, the Marxist critique of wage slavery, feminism and “other pleas on behalf of the dependent and oppressed.” Where the negative liberal believes that the state should ensure “that its citizens do not suffer any unjust or unnecessary interference in the pursuit of their chosen goals”–most notably at the hands of the state–the radical, writes Skinner, “maintains that this can never be sufficient.” The state must also “liberate its citizens from…personal exploitation and dependence.”

…If we read Skinner’s footnotes more carefully, we see that the Hobbesian spirit also haunts the contemporary right. Hobbes’s idea of freedom pervades libertarian discourse, and Leviathan casts a long shadow over the conservative vision of a night watchman state–where the government’s primary purpose is to protect the citizenry from foreign attack and criminal trespass; where people are free to go about their business so long as they do not interfere with the movements of others; where contracts are enforced and security is ensured.

Hobbes as liberal, or even libertarian, is not a new idea. If anything, it has become conventional wisdom on the Left (thanks to C.B. Macpherson) and the Right (thanks to Leo Strauss). But there are still angles to be explored, and I’m less interested in Hobbes as authoritarian liberal than in Hobbes as critic of republican-democratic power.

Professor Robin tries to embarrass libertarians by dredging up Milton Friedman and F.A. Hayek’s association with Augusto Pinochet as an example of Hobbes in action. But ask yourself this question: bloody as Pinochet’s repressions were, were they bloodier than a republican/democratic civil war or revolution would have been? That’s Hobbes’s test. Lately I’ve been thinking about the philosophical connection between conservatism and peace, and questions about authority, power, liberty, civil war, and peace always seem to involve Hobbes, no matter how un-Hobbesian a point one starts from. But again, I don’t see all of this as a sign that Hobbes’s Leviathan is a friend of liberty, rather I’m led to the negative point that radical democrats/republicans are potentially the most murderous and illiberal bunch of all. You can see a bit of that in “Every Man a God-King.”

Over the past 40 years, the trend among young political activists has been the same: The young Left has fought the older generations of the Right (perhaps because it’s simply more fun), with no thought to their emerging antagonists, focusing attention instead on people whose influence and power will naturally wax and wane (i.e., they’ll die soon.) The young Right, oppositely — since the days of Goldwater onward — has insisted on confronting the young Left in a no-holds-barred battle for future generations of influence. This strategic difference goes far toward explaining the inevitability of the Reagan Revolution and, to a lesser extent, the success of George W. Bush.

Young Americans for Liberty is, as of now, a fledging organization (though I counted 168 campus chapters nationwide on their website). But it has my vote for the right-wing student organization likeliest to effect genuine realignment within the Republican Party as we enter the era of bank takeovers and public option health care reform. Now economic issues, not foreign policy matters, have taken center stage in American politics. Many conservative young people, who will be responsible for whatever realignment takes place, seem utterly uninterested in obsessing about terrorism and foreign policy matters; the Ron Paul line works just fine for them. Ron Paul is, at least from my calculations, a rambling reactionary. But there is a modest chance he — and not Mssrs. Obama and McCain — will emerge as the transcendent figure from the 2008 presidential race.

This is a good place to mention that the third issue of YAL‘s official publication, Young American Revolution is out now and includes articles be Jim Antle, Justin Raimondo, Glenn Jacobs (WWE’s Kane), former Rep. John N. Hostettler, and yours truly, as well as young talents such as Bonnie Kristian, Kelse Moen, George Hawley. Subscribe by joining YAL (if you’re under 40) or donating $50 or more (if you’re an older American for liberty). Help take the campuses, and the country, back from the militarists of the Right and the centralizers of the Left — and the centralizers of the Right and militarists of the Left, for that matter.

Las Vegas is Disneyland, only with hookers. I didn’t see any on the street, but they were advertised heavily — the roadside bins where in other cities you can pick up real-estate brochures contain catalogs of girls in Las Vegas. Lining one sidewalk on the Vegas strip was a gauntlet of (presumably) illegal immigrants in neon-green T-shirts handing out cards advertising various demimonde establishments to passersby, few of whom took any interest. The tourists from the Midwest and Japan come for the tacky hotels and the city’s other, more lucrative vice. There are even slot machines in the airport.

Hard-bitten fiscal conservative that I am, I didn’t gamble, although a friend of mine tells me you can get pretty good odds against the house — a little under 50/50 — if you know what you’re doing in craps. FreedomFest itself had some interesting programs, including an always-rousing Campaign for Liberty event with Ron Paul and the absolutely packed sessions of the Liberty editors’ conference. There was standing-room only at Liberty‘s panel on anarchism vs. limited government, which featured Mark Skousen (for minarchism) and David Friedman and Doug Casey (anarchists both, with moderator and Liberty editor Stephen Cox giving Skousen some assistance — Skousen’s intended co-panelist didn’t show). The main sessions of FreedomFest included a great debate on abolishing the Fed, with Tom Woods and Gene Epstein of Barron’s wiping the floor with the pro-Fed John Fund and Warren Coats. (Catch it on C-SPAN this weekend.) While I didn’t gamble, I did fork over some cash at the Laissez-Faire Books table for a copy of Felix Morley’s Freedom and Federalismand the Morley-edited Essays on Individuality (which includes a superb essay by John Dos Passos on individualism in English literature).

In St. Louis the following weekend I looked around my alma mater, Washington University in St. Louis, which is always attractive in the summer but is starting to feel claustrophobic with all the new buildings hemming in the hilltop campus. The economic collapse and decimation of the university’s endowment should put the breaks on any more of that that for a while. I got some good bargains in the campus bookstore, picking up the Transaction edition of Peter Viereck’s Metapoliticsand a copy of Bryan Caplan’s The Myth of the Rational Voter,as well as a Michael Walzer book that reminds me how much I despise egalitarian liberals. The things Walzer sees as defects in society — like hierarchy — I consider virtues in much need of restoration.

Now I’m back in D.C. and the new TAC is out, which means I have time for blogging again.