A Note: Some Persistent Structures of Antiliberal Thought

Something short I am not satisfied with, so I am hiding it behind the paywall, but I want to get back to it, so I want it looking at me...

Something short I am not satisfied with, so I am hiding it behind the paywall, but I want to get back to it, so I want it looking at me...

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I often say that Frank Fukuyama's big mistake in his “The End of History” <https://www.jstor.org/stable/24027184> was believing that fascism had died at the hands of the Red Army in the rubble of Berlin in 1945. Yet at the same time Frank was writing, Isaiah Berlin was undertaking one of his expeditions into the intellectual milieu of Saint Petersburg in the 1800s, and finding there what we now recognize as what we now see revived as Trumpism:

Isaiah Berlin (1990): Joseph de Maistre & the Origins of Fascism: ‘This is… a genuine conviction… that men can only be saved by being hemmed in by the terror of authority…. Their appointed masters must do the duty laid upon them by their maker (who has made nature a hierarchical order) by the ruthless imposition of the rules—not sparing themselves—and equally ruthless extermination of the enemy. And who is the enemy? All those who throw dust in the eyes of the people or seek to subvert the appointed order. Maistre calls them “la secte.” They are the disturbers and subverters. To the Protestants and Jansenists he now adds deists and atheists, Freemasons and scientists, democrats, Jacobins, liberals, utilitarians, anticlericals, egalitarians, perfectibilians, materialists, idealists, lawyers, journalists, secular reformers, and intellectuals of every breed; all those who appeal to abstract principles, who put faith in individual reason or the individual conscience; believers in individual liberty or the rational organization of society, reformers and revolutionaries…. This is a catalog of which we have since heard a good deal. It assembles for the first time, and with precision, the list of the enemies of the great counterrevolutionary movement that culminated in fascism… <https://www.nybooks.com/articles/1990/09/27/joseph-de-maistre-and-the-origins-of-fascism/>

The lesson that personal authority is necessary—that, as Karl Polanyi wrote at the end of The Great Transformation—fascists believe that individual freedom must be surrendered to obedience to the will of the leader if humans are to live successfully in society—is, indeed, the basic fascist lesson. People must, in Polanyi’s words, “resign [themselves] to relinquishing freedom and glorif[y the] power which is the reality of society”, just as a single stick that claims to be free is soon broken, while if it loses its freedom in a stick-bundle tied with leather thongs it becomes a mighty force in the hand of its wielder. Mussolini took this to be the lesson from the power he saw in ethno-nationalism during World War I.

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But there are other liberal and anti-liberal currents.

Lenin suffered from the infantile mental disorder.of believing that upon the removal of the market the oppressive state would also wither away, and all would be very simple and easy, for:

accounting and control necessary... have been simplified by capitalists to the utmost and reduced to the extraordinarily simple operations—which any literate person can perform—of supervising and recording, knowledge of the four rules of arithmetic, and issuing appropriate receipts…

What a maroon!!

Keynes thought the problem could be finessed with an extremely light-handed amount of central planning: full-employment policy, and the euthanization of the rentier class by the low-interest rates need to implement full-employment policy, would do enough of the job to make the economic problem cease being a bigger deal than the problem of the continued survival of Disco.

Polanyi himself called for a kind of “socialism”. But what kind? He wrote:

acceptance of the reality of society gives man indomitable courage and strength.... As long as he is true to the task of creating more abundant freedom for all, he need not fear that either power or planning will turn against him and destroy the freedom he is building by their instrumentality...

That peroration may have satisfied Polanyi, but I have no idea what it means.