Socialism After Sotomayor

Sitting at dinner the other night and having green beans and corn bread, my friend Mark Schneider mentioned that the boy next door had grown up to become a famous intellectual who had written a tome entitled Socialism After Hayek. The boy's name was Theodore Burczak, who now teaches at Denison University in Grandville, Ohio.

I didn't even know who Hayek was. Hayek was an Austrian economist who wrote a famous book in the 1940s entitled The Road to Serfdom. He taught at the University of Chicago for several decades. He died in 1991 shortly after having the Medal of Freedom hung about his neck by H.W. Bush. He was 92 years old.

I bought Hayek's The Road to Serfdom yesterday for $15.oo at Book Culture in the Columbia University area. In it, Hayek argues that Marxism and National Socialism come out of the same admixture of ideas, and that the offer of a social net comes at the price of government control of the people, and with this paternalistic or maternalistic concern for the people comes also the total denial of individual freedoms.

Hayek writes, "The 'German idea of the state,' as formulated by Fichte, Lassalle, and Rodbertus, is that the state is neither founded nor formed by individuals, nor an aggregate of individuals, nor is its purpose to serve any interest of individuals. It is a Volkgemeinschaft in which the individual has no rights but only duties. Claims of the individual are always an outcome of the commercial spirit" (183).

In a note underneath the editor of the volume has written that Volkgemeinschaft translates as "racially pure community."

What does this mean? That all racial thinking that denies the individual is national socialist in its inspiration?

That therefore Sotomayor is a National Socialist in her Destefano decision to uphold the decision against the New Haven firefighters, which was repudiated yesterday by the Supreme Court? Is all racialist thinking radically racist in Hitleresque terms? I'm not certain that Hayek would go so far, but in trying to stretch his thinking to shed a ray of light on our own questions of today, one wonders whether Sotomayor is Puerto Rican at all in her thinking, and whether she isn't actually a German idealist who abstracts her national identity into a Marxian abstraction with which to club all contenders with National Socialist victimization theory.

It seems that Hayek thought that thinking in large Hegelian abstractions was a German notion, and that it was against the English tradition of thinking in terms of minute particulars. Orwell's great argument was to denounce the abstractions of the Marxist left and to write in concrete details. That tradition in turn perhaps extends back to the empiricists: Locke, Hume, Berkeley, as the counter-tradition to Hegel, Marx, and Heidegger.

Could Hayek, an Austrian, be on the side of positivism and individualism, against the great Hegelian abstractions? I'm still reading. It's not a long book, and the writing is fairly lucid for such a puzzling arena as comparative history of ideas.

Hayek quotes some proto-Nazi nut named Professor Johann Plenge who writes, "Because in the sphere of ideas Germany was the most convinced exponent of all socialist dreams, and in the sphere of reality she was the most powerful architect of the most higly organized economic system, -- In us is the twentieth century. However the war may end, we are the exemplary people. Our ideas will determine the aims of the life of humanity" (185). Plenge was writing in 1916 (he lived until 1963 where he taught at Leipzig), and was an advocate of organizational socialism (184). He uses the term "national socialism" throughout his 1916 book, a book to which Hitler and his cronies, Hayek suggests, goosestepped.

Plenge saw power as something the race-nation must seize, so as to push out all other peoples in their grab for control of the world's resources. Many of Plenge's writings, and the writings of his particular circle, espouse a militaristic conception of the nation-state. The editor of the volume mentions that one could read Ernst Junger's Storm of Steel (Penguin 2004) as representative of this mentality.

It was a mentality that hated individualist liberalism, and proposed instead a militaristic national socialism in which a given people fought against other given peoples for the right to control the world's resources, with the race-state having total control over the economy.

It's odd to think how shattered and falsified the very words we use are in which "liberal" is now conjoined with "socialist," not only on Fox News and in the mouth of Sean Hannity and others, but also in books like Michael Berube's recent book What's Liberal About the Liberal Arts?

Which is in fact a socialist tome.

We have a very shallow understanding of the great ideas working underneath the surface over the last two hundred or three hundred years to use these terms interchangeably. Those who are shaping our arguments have almost no sense of the terms they are using.

People with just a tad more intellectual history under their belt understand the profound differences between these two powerful driving wedges. In Keywords, Raymond Williams writes,

"...liberalism is a doctrine based on INDIVIDUALIST (q.v.) theories of man and society and is thus in fundamental conflict not only with SOCIALIST (q.v.) but with most strictly SOCIAL (q.v.) theories. The further observation, that liberalism is the highest form of thought developed within BOURGEOIS (q.v.) society and in terms of CAPITALISM (q.v.), is also relevant, for when liberal is not being used as a loose swear-word, it is to this mixture of liberating and limiting ideas that it is intended to refer. Liberalism is then a doctrine of certain necessary kinds of freedom but also, and essentially, a doctrine of possessive individualism" (150).

How the terms became conflated so that they essentially mean the same thing is beyond me. Perhaps it's a shell game, but I doubt if our cultural pundits are that literate. I think rather that they have very blunt conceptions of history, and are doing the best they can with their blunted vision.

Let's try to clarify for one and all. Totalitarians want the state to rule, and they want a one-party state in which the individual has zero rights and we have a top-down system that can say, for instance, who gets a promotion and who does not, based on what some authority figure determines to be right for the race that they represent.

Liberalism is quite the opposite, it is based on individualism, and is laissez-faire.

Hayek in his day is arguing against the "Totalitarians in our midst" who would have the nation-state control the economy. I don't know why I had never heard of him. He's worth reading. It says on the book jacket that he is the "principal proponent of libertarianism in the twentieth century."

When we think in large abstractions such as race and gender, I've always sensed that we are doing something we shouldn't. It comes to the fore in Marx, and in Hitler, and in many of today's feminists and race theorists. Hayek has many salutary comments against this. Hayek quotes Reinhold Niebuhr on one of the many side-effects of this thinking. "There is... 'an increasing tendency among modern men to imagine themselves ethical because they have delegated their vices to larger and larger groups.' To act on behalf of a group seems to free people of many of the moral restraints which control their behavior as individuals within the group" (163).

At any rate, Hayek seems to have some good hits against the corporate thinkers arising out of German idealism.

Whether he in turn has something that I would back, is another issue. I'm not certain that I think that all-out individualistic capitalism is all that great, especially when it results in factories spewing arsenic into the atmosphere, and workers being abused, sexually assaulted by managers, as we now see in the news reports coming out of China (which is an absurd blend of all-out capitalism, and all-out state control).

The ideas behind our ideas are difficult to track down, and very few can really trace those roots reliably. Hayek's better than most.

I don't know yet about Theodore Burczak, the boy next door. First, I want to read Hayek. Then, I'll read Burczak, and then I'll read a variety of commentary on both of them, to see what light can be shed on the mysteries we confront.