A recent contribution to this genre is Kenneth R. Hoover’s Economics as Ideology. A political science professor at Western Washington University, Hoover wants to find out what made Harold Laski a socialist, F. A. Hayek a proponent of free-market liberalism, and John Maynard Keynes, well, a Keynesian.

Laski was one of the most prominent and influential advocates of socialism in Great Britain in the decades from World War I to the early 1950s. His writings and political activities helped move his country in the direction of central planning and the welfare state. Hoover concludes that Laski’s ideology and politics were driven by a falling out with his businessman father and the Orthodox Judaism of his family. His whole life was supposedly a revolt against the chains and apparent social insensitivity of religious and cultural conservatism.

Keynes was the product of a British intellectual elite and a generation at the beginning of the twentieth century that was determined to break free of Victorian morality. A focus on the pleasures of the moment and a probabilistic theory of uncertainty concerning the future resulted in Keynes discounting many of the long-run consequences from short-run policies. In Hoover’s account, his homosexual adventures as a young man and his failure to father children after he married also made him think a lot less about the future impact of present policies.

Hayek, on the other hand, resented the rules and regulations that come with greater government control of social and economic affairs because of a bad marriage he entered into when he was a young man and a difficult divorce immediately after World War II. Untangling himself from an unwanted marriage, according to Hoover, supposedly is the key to understanding Hayek’s desire for a society with fewer restraints on the choices of individuals.

The difficulty with taking all such psycho-ideological analyses seriously is that they can be used to explain almost anything, and therefore explain nothing. There have been Jews who renounced their religious and cultural ancestry and became classical liberals. There have been free-spirited homosexuals who became social and political conservatives. And there have been people trapped in bad marriages and difficult divorces who became radical socialists.

An equally crucial weakness in Hoover’s book is his failure to come to grips with many of the important issues and arguments that separated these three protagonists in the decades between the two world wars. He gives the clearest analysis when critically evaluating Laski. He shows that Laski could not reconcile a desire for participatory democracy and greater human freedom with his ideal of economic planning. Hoover points out that as the years went by, the argument for centralized government control increasingly replaced Laski’s defense of personal liberty. And he explains that Laski never attempted to seriously grapple with the practical difficulties of centrally planning the production and consumption activities of tens of millions of people.

But in many ways Hoover’s discussion of Laski is a sideshow to his central purpose: to argue that Keynes and his political-economic views represented the level-headed and moderate course that was relevant in the 1920s and 1930s, and is still important and relevant today. In making this case, Hayek becomes a foil, the extreme “right-wing” opponent of reasonable government action, blinded by a near-irrational hatred of political power applied for good social purposes.

Through all the details of Keynes’s and Hayek’s personal lives and academic activities in the period between the wars, Hoover devotes practically no time to an exposition of their competing theories of what caused the Great Depression or how to get out of it. Hayek is merely portrayed as the advocate of “do-nothingism” in an epoch of massive unemployment, while Keynes was designing practical policies to save society from want and waste.

The shallowness of Hoover’s understanding comes out most clearly in his discussion of Hayek’s critique of socialist planning. Hayek argued that the division of knowledge that inevitably accompanies the division of labor precludes any group of central planners from being able to integrate all the information required for central planning to succeed. Only the system of competitively generated market prices can coordinate the activities of multitudes of interdependent human beings.

Without any detailed discussion of the types and qualities of the knowledge used in a market society (which Hayek spent a good deal of time explaining in many of his writings), Hoover merely asserts that he sees no reason for thinking that most if not all such knowledge and information could not be absorbed and used by intelligent regulators and planners. And he conveys an unbelievably naïve conception of democracy as a forum for inclusive social participation, which suggests a total unawareness of the Public Choice literature about the actual special-interest-group workings of the political process.

In a nutshell, Hoover’s book is another rear-guard action by one who wishes to rationalize the continuation of the interventionist-welfare state and the presumed ability of an intellectual elite to guide the economic affairs of others—all for their own good, of course.

To many, the Austrian and Chicago economists seem to be saying the same thing: markets are an efficient way of using scarce resources to best serve consumers; individuals know their own interests and circumstances better than government regulators and planners; political controls tend to distort supply and demand and the price system through which markets are kept in balance. In addition, members of both schools of thought have long warned that inflation and its negative consequences stem from government monetary mismanagement.

As a result, on the surface there seems not to be much difference between the two schools. Yet anyone fairly familiar with the Austrian and Chicago approaches knows that in fact they not only look at the world through significantly different conceptual lenses, they often are extremely critical of each other.

In his recent book, Vienna and Chicago: Friends or Foes?, Mark Skousen tries to explain the history of the Austrian and Chicago approaches, and critically evaluate their strengths and weaknesses. Skousen explains the beginnings of the Austrian school in the last decades of the nineteenth century, during which Carl Menger, Eugen von Böhm-Bawerk, and Friedrich von Wieser developed the theory of marginal utility and opportunity cost; formulated a theory of capital, investment, and interest; and undermined the foundations of Marxian economics. He then traces the contributions of such leading twentieth-century Austrians as Ludwig von Mises and F. A. Hayek in the areas of monetary and business-cycle theory, their insightful criticisms on socialist central planning, and their conception of the market as a dynamic competitive process.

The Chicago school developed later, in the 1920s and 1930s, out of the writings of Frank Knight, Jacob Viner, and Henry Simons, who were early critics of some aspects of Keynesian economics and of government planning. But the Chicago school only really flowered in the postwar era out of the contributions of Milton Friedman and George Stigler, who challenged, respectively, some of the rationales for macroeconomic and regulatory management of market activities.

For the remainder of the book, Skousen contrasts the two schools on a variety of topics, including methodology; inflation, business cycles and the monetary system; and government regulation and intervention. Somewhat irritatingly, Skousen concludes each section by declaring which school “wins the debate,” using the language of tennis: “advantage” Vienna or Chicago. While seeming to be a cute way to evaluate the two schools, it comes across as rather sophomoric. Also, it often seems that Skousen’s decision reflects his judgment about which school has been more influential among economists or in the policy arena. But the correctness of an idea is not measured, per se, by the number of its adherents. Alchemy and astrology have had wide followings, after all.

The core of the differences between the Austrian and Chicago schools is the question of how one tries to understand the world, including the market. Imagine that two objects are observed moving toward each other at a certain velocity. What can we predict about what will happen? Well, we can attempt to estimate their respective speeds and calculate when they are likely to collide, given the measured space between them.

There is nothing wrong with doing this. But if the two objects happen to be human beings, limiting the “facts” or “evidence” to these quantitative dimensions will leave out crucial features of the situation. For example, do these individuals view each other as friend or foe? The answer to that question alone will greatly influence what we predict as the likely sequence of events as they come closer to each other. (If foe, one of them might suddenly stop dead in his tracks and run in the oppose direction from fear.)

To analyze this situation requires the social scientist or economist to look beneath the quantitative surface to try to determine how the actors define the situation, including the meanings they see in their own actions and those of others with whom they may interact. A voluntary exchange and a coerced transfer may look the same to an observer. But they are certainly not the same when understood from the perspectives of the actors.

Unlike the Chicago-school economists, the Austrians have always insisted on emphasizing this “subjectivist” approach. This is partly due to the Chicagoans’ continuing belief (a subjective state of mind, for sure!) that “science” should be defined narrowly as the quantitatively measurable and predictable.

Skousen tries to reduce and ridicule the Austrian view by making it into a caricature of an “a priori deductive” approach that is both incorrect and unjust to the actual arguments that Austrians like Mises developed in great detail. Nor does Skousen do justice to the fact that Austrians, too, believe in “applied” economics, historical studies, and factual evidence. They just do “empirical” work differently from the Chicago economists—the Austrian approach tries not to forget that it is the course of human events that is being investigated.

He therefore too easily gives “advantage” to the Chicago school when comparing their contributions, for instance, in the area of government regulation. The Austrians focus on the entrepreneurial element of innovation and market coordination; they think of competition as a creative discovery procedure; and they view markets as processes of change and adjustment through time. To appreciate the power of the unregulated market, none of these aspects of the real “empirical” world can simply be reduced to econometric coefficients of correlation without losing essential qualities of the subject. It would be like trying to study man by looking only at the skeleton and ignoring the flesh, blood, muscles, nerve endings, and most especially, the mind that guides what the body does.

Skousen finds the most important Austrian contributions in the areas of money, inflation, the business cycle, and monetary institutions. This should not be surprising since these are the areas in which he has written the most over the years from an Austrian-oriented perspective. Friedman’s monetary contributions have basically followed in the Keynesian footsteps. While rejecting most of Keynes’s assumptions about the power of fiscal policy for stimulating the economy, Friedman accepted his “aggregate” approach of looking almost purely at money’s impact on prices, wages, and output in general.

The Austrians, on the other hand, have always focused on the more insidious effects of monetary expansion on relative prices and wages, and on demand, effects that can give a wrong twist to the entire economy.

Unfortunately, while an easy read and even entertaining in places, Vienna and Chicago fails to give the reader a fully balanced understanding of the Austrians or a sufficiently critical appreciation of the limits of the Chicago school.

In his new collection of essays, Black Rednecks and White Liberals, Sowell once again performs this task with great insight. The title essay, which opens the volume, shows that what passes for “black culture” in the United States, with its particular language, customs, behavioral characteristics, and attitudes toward work and leisure, is in fact a collection of traits adopted from earlier white southern culture.

Sowell traces this culture to several generations of mostly Scotsmen and northern Englishmen who migrated to many of the southern American colonies in the eighteenth century. The outstanding features of this redneck culture, or “cracker” culture as it was called in Great Britain at that time, included “an aversion to work, proneness to violence, neglect of education, sexual promiscuity, improvidence, drunkenness, lack of entrepreneurship, reckless searches for excitement, lively music and dance, and a style of religious oratory marked by rhetoric, unbridled emotions, and flamboyant imagery.” It also included “touchy pride, vanity, and boastful self-dramatization.”

Any commercial industriousness and innovation introduced in the southern states in the nineteenth and early part of the twentieth centuries, Sowell demonstrates, primarily came from businessmen, merchants, and educators who moved there from the northern and especially the New England states. The north generally had a different culture—of work, savings, personal responsibility, and forethought—that resulted in the southern United States lagging far behind much of the rest of the country—a contrast often highlighted by nineteenth-century European visitors.

The great tragedy for much of the black population, concentrated as it was in the southern states, was that it absorbed a great deal of this white southern redneck culture, and has retained it longer than the descendants of those Scottish and English immigrants. In a later chapter in the book, devoted to “Black Education: Achievements, Myths and Tragedies,” Sowell explains that in the decades following the Civil War, black schools and colleges in the south were mostly manned by white administrators and teachers from New England who, with noticeable success, worked to instill “Yankee” virtues of hard work, discipline, education, and self-reliance.

In spite of racial prejudice and legal discrimination, especially in the southern states, by the middle decades of the twentieth century a growing number of black Americans were slowly but surely catching up with white Americans in terms of education, skills, and income. One of the great perversities of the second part of the twentieth century, Sowell shows, is that this advancement decelerated following the enactment of the civil-rights laws of the 1960s, with the accompanying affirmative action and emphasis on respecting the “diversity” of black culture. This has delayed the movement of many black Americans into the mainstream under the false belief that “black culture” is somehow distinct and unique, when in reality it is the residue of an earlier failed white culture that retarded the south for almost 200 years.

A related theme that Sowell discusses in a chapter on “The Real History of Slavery” is that the institution of human bondage is far older than the experience of black enslavement in colonial and then independent America. Indeed, slavery has burdened the human race during all of recorded history and everywhere around the globe. Its origins and practice have had nothing to do with race or racism. Ancient Greeks enslaved other Greeks; Romans enslaved other Europeans; Asians enslaved Asians; and Africans enslaved Africans, just as the Aztecs enslaved other native groups in what we now call Mexico and Central America. Among the most prominent slave traders and slave owners up to our own time have been Arabs, who enslaved Europeans, black Africans, and Asians. In fact, while officially banned, it is an open secret that such slavery still exists in a number of Muslim countries in Africa and the Middle East.

Equally ignored, Sowell reminds us, is that it was only in the West that slavery was challenged on philosophical and political grounds, and that antislavery efforts became a mass movement in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Slavery was first ended in the European countries, and then Western pressure in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries brought about its demise in most of the rest of the world. But this fact has been downplayed because it does not fit into the politically correct fashions of our time. It is significant that in 1984, on the 150th anniversary of the ending of slavery in the British Empire, there was virtually no celebration of what was a historically profound turning point in bringing this terrible institution to a close around the world.

Sowell also turns his analytical eye to the question “Are Jews Generic?” Why have Jews been the victims of so much dislike and persecution throughout the centuries? He argues that the answer can be found in understanding the trades and professions they often specialized in because of legal discrimination and restrictions. Denied the right to own land and other real property in many European countries, and excluded from many politically privileged occupations, they become merchants, middlemen, and financiers. The middleman and the merchant, Sowell explains, have often been the least understood and most mistrusted members in any market economy. They seem to create profit for themselves “merely” by moving goods from one place to another without producing anything “real.” Furthermore, as financiers they seem to earn interest at the expense of others while doing none of the “real work.”

Sowell shows that the same suspicions, angers, and resentments often directed at Jews through the centuries have also been the fate of Chinese traders and merchants in Southeast Asia, or Indians and Pakistanis who have specialized in these activities in Africa. They, like many Jews, have been the victims of persecution, plunder, and physical harm more because of how they earn a living than who they are per se. It is economic ignorance and envy of success that have generated hatred against minorities. And by giving vent to these prejudices, majorities have invariably harmed their own economic well-being by driving out or killing those who performed essential market tasks that benefited all.

In a chapter on “Germans and History,” Sowell challenges the conception that the Holocaust demonstrated something uniquely cruel and evil in the German people. Through the centuries, Germans were known for hard work, discipline, and skill in various specialized occupations and professions, and as respecters of the pursuit of knowledge and education. While anti-Semitism was an element of German society in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries before Hitler came to power, in comparison to many eastern European nations, Germany was an example of tolerance and respect for civil liberties that attracted many Jewish families escaping from persecution in countries to the east.

To a dangerous extent, however, Germans fell victim to the ideologies of nationalism, socialism, and collectivism, which Hitler could play to in the years leading up to his gaining power in 1933. Sowell points out that while the Nazis were rabid in their hatred for Jews, through the 1930s Hitler had to carefully measure the degree to which he could violently persecute the German Jews without arousing the average German’s resistance to disorder and random violence. Also, during those years the Nazis often found it difficult to win the German people’s support for boycotting Jewish-owned businesses or breaking off social interactions with Jews. While the Nazi genocide of six million Jews was one of the great crimes of history, Sowell asks us to resist collectivist judgments and generalizations that detract from judging people as individuals.

In the concluding chapter on “History versus Vision,” Sowell pleads the case for letting history be free from bias, ideological agenda, or political manipulation.While every history is a story about man through the interpretive eyes of the historian, Sowell says that if we are to truly learn from history it should not be reduced to mere propaganda and political fashion.

Anyone who has read The Private Life of Chairman Mao (1996) by Mao’s longtime personal physician, Li Zhi-Sui, would already be disgusted with the man: his failure to bathe or brush his teeth for decades; his wanton use of hundreds of innocent peasant girls (to whom he passed a variety of venereal diseases) for his seemingly insatiable sexual desires; his pleasure in humiliating and hurting even his most loyal followers and fellow communist leaders; and his total disregard for any human life other than his own.

But Jung Chang and Jon Halliday show Mao to be a man of absolute evil. Like many Marxist leaders, Mao was not born into a working-class family. At the time of his birth in 1893, Mao’s father was a relatively successful middle-class farmer in the province of Hunan in south-central China. From an early age Mao was interested neither in physical labor nor systematic education. He preferred to loaf about and read on his own. (Throughout his life he absorbed a vast amount of literature on many subjects, and had special editions of books prepared for himself that became forbidden works for the masses.)

Like Stalin in the Soviet Union, Mao seems to have had neither personal charisma nor the gift of oratory. Rather, he had the ability to manipulate people and situations to his own advantage, slowly rising to the top of the Chinese Communist Party in the 1920s and 1930s. He was ruthless with both friend and foe, viewing everyone he encountered as mere tools to use and then dispose of in pursuit of absolute power.

Mao was married four times. He treated each wife miserably, as he did most of his children, whom he often abandoned to their fate and sometimes to their deaths. During the famous Long March in 1934–1935, when Mao lead the Chinese communist forces from south-central China to a new Red-controlled territory in the northwest region of the country, he made his third wife abandon their baby son as Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalist armies were trying to surround them. Years later, she unsuccessfully hunted the countryside to find her lost child. Her only clue was the assumption that the son might have two of Mao’s distinguishing characteristics: oily ears and an especially pungent underarm odor.

Both before and especially after the Long March, Mao instigated reigns of terror and tyranny on the Chinese peasants who fell under the sway of his forces. Slave labor, starvation rations, and merciless propaganda and indoctrination sessions late into the night became the hallmarks of Chinese communist rule.Cruel and excruciating tortures and methods of execution were devised to assure destruction of all opposition and disobedience to Mao’s power. (The authors describe many of them in indelicate detail.)

Contrary to the left-wing myths of the time, especially in the American press, that Mao’s Red Army was the main Chinese fighting force against the Japanese during World War II, Mao instructed all his commanders to avoid battles with the Japanese. Instead, he worked to conserve his forces as a prelude to the Chinese Civil War that began in 1945 and ended in the communist conquest of the Chinese mainland in 1949.

The authors detail how Mao’s victory would have been impossible without the assistance of Stalin’s Soviet army, which overran Manchuria in the last weeks of the Pacific war. Stalin allowed Mao’s forces to occupy most of Manchuria behind the Soviet shield and turned over vast stores of captured Japanese weaponry.

The authors also explain how General George C. Marshall, then secretary of state in Harry Truman’s administration, was totally manipulated and duped by Mao and his chief diplomatic negotiator, Chou En-Lai. They persuaded Marshall that they were merely “agrarian reformers” wanting justice for the Chinese people in a coalition government with the Nationalists. All the while they were strengthening and positioning the Red Army for a grand attack to seize the rest of China. They succeeded in making Chiang Kai-shek seem to be the stumbling block to a political compromise,which resulted in the U.S. government cutting off all armament sales to the Nationalist government in 1947, just as victory was possibly in the grasp of Chiang’s armies.

Using Chinese and Soviet archival materials, the authors show that Mao happily assisted, with Stalin’s help, in the North Korean invasion of South Korea in June 1950. Mao began assembling Chinese forces to enter the Korean War long before the United Nations forces pushed back the North Korean offensive and then crossed the 38th parallel to unify a free Korea. Mao was ready to continue the war indefinitely to kill tens of thousands of Americans in a conflict of attrition, even at the cost of hundreds of thousands of Chinese soldiers’ lives. Only Stalin’s death in 1953 and the desire of the new Soviet leadership to calm international tensions forced Mao to accept a ceasefire and an end to the Korean conflict.

At an international conference of communist parties in Moscow in 1957 marking the 40th anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution, Mao delivered a speech calling for the start of a nuclear World War III against America. He declared that it did not matter if half of China’s population was killed in the cataclysm, because there would still be hundreds of millions of Chinese left to rise out of the rubble to rule a communist world. Shortly after that, Chou En-Lai told a Soviet envoy visiting Beijing that they should be planning a new capital city for such a communist-controlled world somewhere on a manmade island in the Pacific, since both Moscow and Beijing would likely be incinerated in the nuclear destruction that was to come.That didn’t seem to bother Mao at all.

In the 1950s and 1960s Mao pushed China into a crash program to make his country an industrial and nuclear superpower. Ignorant of all economic concepts, including the ideas of scarcity and tradeoffs, Mao crushed the Chinese population into abject poverty in an attempt to make himself ruler of the world.

While tens of millions of Chinese starved and died, he lived a life of luxury with dozens of atomic bombproof mansions built for his pleasure around the country, all with large swimming pools constantly heated in case he were to show up. But he spent most of his time in Beijing, lying in bed for days on end, eating his specially prepared foods, reading books banned for everyone else, and enjoying group sex whenever the urge came over him.

The authors explain that the Cultural Revolution of 1966–1976 was all a grand plan of Mao’s to settle scores with real and imaginary enemies in order to assure his absolute and unchallenged power over China. In the process, the country was pushed into horrific violence and terror that almost destroyed everything left of civilization in China.

Mao Zedong died in bed, an old and sick man in 1976, at the age of 82. His legacy was the murderous destruction of an entire society.

Wolfe bemoans the fact that he did not have the good fortune to have lived under the political leadership of Abraham Lincoln during the Civil War, or Teddy Roosevelt in the “enlightened” years of the American progressive movement, or even better, through Franklin Roosevelt’s heady New Deal days of reform and regulation, and global greatness during World War II.

Wolfe wishes his life could have been made thrilling with the drumbeat of “great national causes” bigger than the simple affairs of his ordinary personal existence. If only he had been lucky enough to live during a time of a wise and good American Führer, who would have given his life purpose and meaning at home and abroad in the pursuit of “national greatness.” Now in his mid-60s, he still dreams the “greatness” dream that he so badly wants to experience before he passes away from this earth.

Of course, the central question is: what makes for “national greatness”? Most of the book is devoted to telling us what set of ideas and actions do not make for such greatness. In this, he is an “equal opportunity critic.” He takes to task American conservatism, libertarianism, and modern liberalism. He detests conservatives the most. He parades before the reader all the usual charges: conservatives are mean-spirited and only interested in lining the pockets of their country-club buddies. Moreover, dressed in their religious garb, they are self-righteous demagogues who use faith to feather their own financial nests. He disapproves of current American foreign policy, but only because the present Republican administration will not cooperate with other countries for a joint effort to make over the world in our own image. This “go it alone” business is not a basis of “greatness.”

Libertarians come under attack because, well, they think “small.” They believe that individuals should direct their own lives and that any network of human relationships should arise out of the spontaneous interactions of people in the marketplace. For Wolfe, libertarians therefore don’t appreciate that America cannot and will not be “great” unless the nation has a common set of goals directed by a central political authority. Only Big Government can make us “great.” And, of course, he shakes his head in shock that libertarians should still believe in the “absurd” idea that free, unregulated markets can be fair and just.

Modern liberals come under attack as well. Wolfe thinks they are so depressed that the Republicans are in control of the White House and Congress that they just want to hunker down and minimize the damage from conservative domination of American politics. He thinks this is symbolized by the number of liberals who have become extreme environmentalists, wanting to keep the forests and wetlands of America pristine so the conservatives will not cut down every tree, wipe out every endangered species, and drain every pond to build a Wal-Mart. Wolfe harks back, instead, to the happy days of Teddy Roosevelt’s conservation movement in the early twentieth century, under which wise and farseeing government planners managed the forests for a proper balance between man and nature, while preventing greedy loggers from ruining the planet.

What he also dislikes is any presumption of universal and abstract principles that should limit the powers and actions of the federal government. He rejects the notion that the “truths” of the Founding Fathers should in any way influence the role and scope of government in the 21st century. How can government undertake great things today if it is constrained by an out-of-date constitution written more than 200 years ago? Great government leaders must have the discretion to do bold things with American resources and lives, so we can be molded into something larger than our little individual existences. In Wolfe’s eyes, expediency and pragmatism are the hallmarks of great nations and great leaders.

Typical of too many political scientists,Wolfe seems to be blissfully ignorant of what economics has to say about the political process. Public Choice theory, as this branch of economics is called, has been lucidly demonstrating for many years the perverse effects that arise when governments are not narrowly restrained by constitutional limits in what they may do, and for what. Once the political system is “freed” from being guided by abstract truths and principles concerning individual liberty, politics soon sinks into a destructive game of special-interest groups dividing up favors and privileges at the expense of the taxpayers and consumers.

So what does Wolfe want the American government to do to guide us back onto the path of national greatness? Well, after waiting with bated breath until the last chapter, we finally find out: He wants government to enact an array of “fundamental economic rights” that include national health care, a “living wage” for every American worker, a “right to decent schools,” and guaranteed social security. And, oh yes, he calls for some new backbone in modern liberals so they once again will be stirred to support American political and military interventionism in order to make the world a better place through benevolent Big Government.

There it is. “National greatness” equals the same old laundry list of welfare statist and socialist programs, without which Americans will remain puny. Indeed, Wolfe arrogantly says that Americans are getting the less-than-greatness they deserve because they refuse to give the government far greater power over their lives. Or should I say that Americans show their “smallness” by not voting for politicians who have the foresight and wisdom to impose on us Alan Wolfe’s vision of what’s good.

Only when we hand over power to a Führer of whom Wolfe approves will he finally be able to say he has lived in an epoch of national greatness. Unfortunately, it will require the rest of us to give up our individual dreams so Alan Wolfe can have his big one.

Europe had not experienced a prolonged and massively destructive war since the defeat of Napoleon one hundred years earlier. To be sure, there had been some wars and civil wars, especially in central and eastern Europe during the nineteenth century. But they were relatively short and, compared to what were experienced in the twentieth century, rather limited in their destruction of life and property. “Rules of warfare” recognized the rights of neutrals and noncombatants in Europe, though not in the colonial areas of Asia and Africa.

But in the last decades of the nineteenth century, beneath the appearance of a classical-liberal utopia of freedom, peace, and prosperity, new ideological forces had been winning the hearts and minds of a growing number of people. These forces were socialism, nationalism, and imperialism—in a word, philosophical, political, and economic collectivism.

The air was filled with calls to arms in the name of national greatness and glory, talk of a higher social good more important than the “mere” interests of individuals, and the notion that peoples discovered their “destinies” not in peaceful industry, but on battlefields amid the thrust of bayonets.

Four years after the war began, by the autumn of 1918, more than 20 million Frenchmen, Englishmen, Germans, Austrians, Hungarians Italians, Russians, Greeks, Turks, Armenians, Serbs, Poles, Romanians, Bulgarians, and many others were dead. European industry and agriculture were ruined, and a good part of the accumulated wealth of a century had been consumed.

Jim Powell, in his book Wilson’s War, tells the story of how this came about, what the consequences were, and the role Woodrow Wilson played in making this entire catastrophe worse than it might have been.

While not ignoring Imperial German militarism, aggressiveness, and bellicosity in the decades before World War I, Powell emphasizes the various nationalist ambitions and secret alliances among all the major belligerents that kept the war from being simply “Germany’s fault.” Battlefield incompetence by generals and political arrogance and stubbornness by national leaders on both sides dragged the war on and on in the face of mounting casualties and growing economic hardship unknown in living memory.

At first, Powell explains, Wilson—a vain and often vengeful man—claimed the role of impartial arbiter to bring the war to a negotiated conclusion. But soon both he and his circle of cabinet members and advisers decided that victory should belong to Great Britain and France. Finally, after winning reelection in 1916 on the slogan “He kept us out of war,” Wilson had Congress declare war on Germany in April 1917, although neither Germany nor any of its allies had attacked or threatened the United States. At the peace conference that followed the November 1918 armistice, Wilson’s idealistic rhetoric was drowned out by the imperial and territorial ambitions of the British and French that left Germany and the former Austro-Hungarian and Russian Empires in a shambles.

Powell persuasively suggests that if America had stayed out of the war the belligerents, exhausted and with no hope of a clear battlefield victory, might have accepted the need to end the conflict without any winner. Had that happened, there might well have been no Bolshevik revolution in Russia and therefore no deadly 75-year “experiment” in Soviet communism under Lenin, Stalin, and those who followed them. If Germany had not been humiliated, stripped of 13 percent of its territory, burdened with “war guilt” and heavy reparations, and left in political and economic chaos, a demagogue like Hitler, with his Nazi ideology of racism and blood lust for revenge and conquest through a new war, might not have come to power.

Had America not taken the path of foreign intervention in 1917, it might not have set the precedent of assuming the mantle of global policeman throughout the remainder of the twentieth century and now into the 21st century. In the world Woodrow Wilson did so much to create, the United States suffered not only hundreds of thousands of casualties in two global wars, but also over a hundred thousand additional deaths in the Korean and Vietnam wars.

Nor should it be forgotten that this U.S. role has cost Americans dearly in other ways: hundreds of billions of dollars in tax money; the growth and increased intrusiveness of the federal government; and their placement in harm’s way throughout the world. This has been a heavy price to pay for Woodrow Wilson’s war ambitions.

When the masterful and detailed study of twentieth-century communist regimes, The Black Book of Communism, was first published in France in the 1990s, for instance, one French leftist tried to rationalize the human cost of socialist tyranny by arguing: “Agreed, both Nazis and communists killed. But while the Nazis killed from hatred of humanity, the communists killed from love.”

Nazis, it seems, had bad intentions and used bad methods. Communists, on the other hand, had good intentions–they loved their fellow man and wanted to create a utopia for him–they just made an unfortunate error in selecting less-than-desirable means. Oh, well, back to the drawing board!

Richard Overy’s recent work, The Dictators: Hitler’s Germany, Stalin’s Russia, is the most detailed and methodical study, so far, of what the two totalitarian regimes shared in common and in what ways they differed. Indeed, there are few aspects of political, economic, social, and cultural life in Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union that do not receive meticulous analysis from the author.

It is in the concluding chapter of the book that one discovers what Overy considers the most fundamental premises of the two regimes. Both the Nazis and the communists, he argues, were guided by the spirit of scientism: the misplaced application of the methods of the natural sciences to the arena of human life. Marxian socialists were convinced that they could deduce the “laws” of historical development that necessitated the inevitable triumph of “the workers” over their capitalist exploiters. In addition, they believed that once the revolution had been orchestrated, the “dictatorship of the proletariat” had the ability to remake man and transform society into a collectivist paradise.

The Nazis also believed in the power of science, but in their case it was a “racial science” that defined different human groups and their hierarchical relationships to each other. Through application of eugenics, a purified “master race” could be socially engineered, with “the Germans” being the superior breed meant to rule the world.

Communism and Nazism, therefore, were variations on the same collectivist theme, in which the individual and his identity as a person were determined by either his “class” or “race.” Both were paranoid in their outlook on life. Nazis saw racial threats everywhere, in the form of inferior groups that could defile Germany’s blood purity. Communists saw class enemies surrounding and threatening the existence of the Soviet workers’ state. Vigilance at the borders and secret-police terror internally were essential for the regimes to preserve either the master race or the proletarian paradise.

Hitler and Stalin were convinced of their unique and irreplaceable roles in making history. Hitler believed that just as there is a master race among humanity, so there is a master leader within the master race, who through intuition, insight, and will power knows what is needed to assure the rightful place and destiny of the German people. Fate had called him to that task. Following in Lenin’s footsteps, Stalin believed that socialist victory was impossible without professional revolutionaries who served as the vanguard of the proletariat. Among the vanguard there was the necessity for one determined leader to head the movement, with “history” having assigned Stalin this momentous duty.

For Hitler and Stalin, their ruthlessness and disregard of human life were essential to fulfill their role as leaders of the Nazi and communist causes. What was, perhaps, most dangerous in both men was that they believed in what they were doing to bring their versions of utopia into existence. Hitler and Stalin were “true believers.”

The power of “scientific” social engineering was present in everything that they commanded for the reconstruction of German and Soviet society. Stalin introduced five-year central plans in 1929; Hitler imposed four-year central plans in 1936. Nothing was outside the orbit of control and command, from the most mundane consumer goods to the redesigning of whole cities and the wider countryside. Art, literature, music, sports, and leisure were all used to mold the tens of millions of subjects under their power into the desired shape for a beautiful tomorrow.

As Overy carefully recounts, there was little that was random in the Nazi and Soviet use of terror and imprisonment. Those, too, were planned with a purpose in mind. They targeted the designated “enemies of the people” to isolate and destroy all who opposed “the brave new world” in the making. But those arrested and sent off to concentration camps in Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union were also viewed as forced labor for building the Nazi and Soviet societies. The victims were all part of the same central plan, whether for work or extermination.

Overy also highlights the degree of popularity that both the Nazis and communists achieved in German and Soviet society. The secret police were tiny fractions of those populations. With little prodding people willingly spied and informed on their friends, relatives, and neighbors. Both regimes promised and seemed to deliver a new ideal of “equality” in which devotion and hard work in the service of “the cause” assured that even the lowly could find status, position, and reward, now that the old class distinctions were swept away. The state monopoly over news and information succeeded in persuading millions of the truth and justice of the regimes under which they lived. The “masses” in both countries passively or actively worked for the system, with little resistance or opposition.

The Nazi and Soviet regimes have passed away, their cruelties fading in memory. Yet one wonders–if such ideologies could once before mesmerize so many, could they not do so again? Under the right circumstance, could not the appeal of utopia drag humanity once more into a vortex of destruction?

Freedom also requires the will to resist using force to obtain what others have. The free society demands that we each renounce the use of violence and fraud in our relationships with others. When others choose to buy from someone else rather than us, freedom demands that we not turn to government to make them do what they do not want to do.

Throughout most of history the price of freedom has been more than many have been willing to pay. Intolerance and dogmatism have straitjacketed men’s minds and deeds. At the same time, government power has been placed, over and over again, at the service of those who want to plunder their neighbors rather than associate with them peacefully and consensually.

Human history is also the tragic story of brutality, cruelty, and frequent mass murder in the effort to stifle “dangerous” or “heretical” thoughts and actions, to eliminate scapegoats, and to steal from others. How easily many men have become the willing or passive accomplices in the destruction of the lives and fortunes of others!

It is therefore worth asking if Michael Novak is right when he titles his new book The Universal Hunger for Liberty. The impetus for Novak is the question whether Western civilization is irreconcilably in conflict with the Islamic world. He emphasizes the unique properties in Western culture as it has developed over hundreds of years: the importance of reason in understanding the world and its application to the mastery of material existence; an appreciation and respect for the dignity and sanctity of the individual and an accompanying belief in a higher law than that of man which has grown out of the Judeo-Christian heritage; an allegiance to the rule of law and checks on political power to protect the freedom of every individual; an optimism about life and the future of the human condition that fosters innovation, risk-taking, and economic and social change for a better tomorrow; and an understanding that neither freedom nor prosperity can be maintained or expanded without private property and freedom of enterprise.

Over a series of chapters, Novak articulates the arguments and facts that demonstrate these unique and crucial qualities that have created what we call “the West.” He does so, very often, with great clarity and eloquence. Arguably, his purpose is not only to show how “we” may differ from or have various commonalities with other societies and cultures, but also to remind Western readers (including and especially in the United States) what has made the freedom and prosperity that we enjoy.

As historian Robert Conquest has warned in his new book, The Dragons of Expectations: Reality and Delusion in the Course of History, those things that have made Western society (especially America and Britain) great have been and are being eaten away from within by ideological elites and political-economic plunderers who are undermining the morality and institutional order on which our system of liberty and law has been based.

While Novak compellingly shows that many of the outer trappings of Western society are being “globalized,” particularly in formerly socialist countries, it is far from clear that the ethical, cultural, and religious underpinnings that produced liberty and limited government in the West are as rapidly becoming part of the everyday consciousness of people in other parts of the world. The apparent spread of “democracy” in many countries is not the same thing as the expansion of the culture and morality of liberty. The latter takes several generations before it becomes a “self-evident” element in the thinking and attitudes of men–and its precariousness at times of “national crisis” has been shown more than once in the Western world itself.

Thus when Novak tries to explain and interpret the possibility of freedom in the Islamic world, he acknowledges that traditionally the autonomy of the individual has never been as respected there as it is in the West. And he can merely suggest ways in which traditional Islam may continue to evolve in directions that will make it compatible with the central tenets of Western civilization if moderate and “enlightened” voices increase in number in opposition to the radical extremists.

But the direction of history cannot be accelerated by force–too often when it has been tried, it has generated disaster. It would be wiser if we in the West devoted a good portion of our time to getting our own political, economic, and cultural house in order before liberty at home is threatened beyond repair. That would be the finest and most effective stimulus for freedom that we could contribute to the rest of the world.

In the first half of the twentieth century, a growing number of economists became increasingly interested in trying to make economics “rigorously scientific.” In their eyes this required quantitative model-building, in which men and their actions were reduced to “dependent variables” in a series of mathematical equations. The individual became a mere passive “reactor” to various “constraints” in the arena of exchange. The surrounding political, legal, and economic institutions were simply the analytical “background” for people’s constraint-determining choices. How these institutions emerge and evolve, and how men’s ideas and actions might influence and change these institutions over time, were almost never discussed.

Over the last 30 years, however, there has slowly developed a field called the New Institutional Economics, which focuses precisely on the interaction between man and social institutions. One of the path-breaking contributors in this field has been Douglass C. North, the 1993 recipient of the Nobel Prize in economics for his writings on American and European economic history. In his recent book, Understanding the Process of Economic Change, North explains the importance of institutions for improving the human condition, and the difficulties in developing theories and policies for bettering society.

North’s starting point is to emphasize the inherent uncertainty and unpredictability of the world in which man lives, a condition that precludes the application of the type of static and deterministic mathematical models that dominate most economics textbooks. The “scientific method” has worked wonders in enabling man to master the laws of the physical world, but it has inherent shortcomings when applied indiscriminately to the human condition.

Man possesses qualities that are uniquely distinct from the objects of study in physics and chemistry: intentionality and creativity. Man thinks, imagines, and plans. This introduces an element of unpredictability not present in the study of inanimate nature. Nor is human action open to stable statistical probability.

Adapting some themes from cognitive psychology, North argues that man is less a logical problem-solver and more a reasoning pattern-discoverer. In other words, the human mind seems to have evolved in such a way that it looks for order and relationships among things and events, even when they may not be there. As a result, man mentally searches for patterns and relationships in the world in order to attain both intelligibility and a degree of predictable certainty.

This is the origin of man’s systems of beliefs and ideas about “how things work,” from primitive superstitions to the most complex theories about the nature and functioning of the social order. These belief systems become intergenerationally transmitted and solidified in customs, traditions, and the other cultural institutions. Thus the institutional order is the cumulative result of generations of interacting minds.

The rules that men live by, North argues, have been generated by man’s quest for reductions in social uncertainty. By constraining his own actions and those of others in his community through norms, values, and interactive procedures that define and determine the codes of conduct, as well as the rationales for legitimacy and obedience, man superimposes degrees of predictability on social and economic processes.

Some of these institutional rules and procedures are formally designed through legal and political codification. But a great many, if not the larger number of them, are informal rules that are learned through being born into and living in a particular society and that are often not fully articulated.

The great transformation in human societal evolution, North explains, occurred when exchange relationships changed from the personal to the impersonal: from the small tribe with its face-to-face relationships to the extended market in which men separated by time and space, and unrelated to each other, became increasingly interconnected through money transactions.

Beliefs and ideas about what was fair, just, and right began to evolve in ways that made possible the development over the centuries of the institutions of modern market economies. North summarizes a number of these historical shifts in Western Europe, especially in banking, bills of exchange, and commercial contracts, which set the stage for the beginning of economic growth and rising prosperity in the Western world during the last five centuries. Greater respect for private property, acceptance of open and relatively unrestricted market competition, more individual liberty under the impartial rule of law, and limits on the regulatory and taxing power of governments liberated the creative energies of men in general and entrepreneurs in particular.

North also shows the inherent rigidities and potential corruption that arise when wrong beliefs and ideas generate institutions that place increased power in the hands of government—whether in its extreme form in, say, the Soviet Union, or in the milder, but no-less-damaging, form of the modern interventionist welfare state.

The dilemma, North argues, is that the right “lessons” are not always learned from these historical experiences. As he puts it, there is often too much “noise” in the historical processes; it is not always clear which causes (institutional and policy changes) have led to which effects (changes in economic well-being, including degrees of freedom). Furthermore, much of the information and interpretation about institutional and policy changes come to us through intellectual and political intermediaries who have their own agendas and misunderstandings about the actual societal processes at work.

The real danger from all this, North warns, is not only that many countries which have never developed the right market-oriented institutions may fail to do so. It is also that freedom and prosperity are not forever guaranteed in any society. In other words, even successful societies can regress and decay, sinking back into economic stagnation and political tyranny, due to the rise of beliefs and ideas that bring about wrong institutional change. North’s hope is that the New Institutional Economics can assist us in seeing that this does not happen and can be used to reverse some of the bad policies already in place.

He juxtaposed what he suggested could be considered two traditions of social and political individualism: the British and the French. The British tradition included such thinkers as John Locke, Bernard Mandeville, Edmund Burke, David Hume, Adam Smith, and Adam Ferguson (the last three of whom were among those often referred to as the Scottish moral philosophers). For these British thinkers, social theory began with a focus on the individual because they understood that “society” is not an entity separate from the interactions of the individuals who comprise it. To understand the origin and evolution of society, we must understand the logic and interactive processes of human action.

Furthermore, in this British tradition the conception of man is not that of a rational calculator presumed to possess perfect knowledge and guided only by a narrow material notion of “self-interest.” Instead, man was seen as motivated by passions as much as by cool reason, with imperfect and limited knowledge. The social order and many of its institutional traditions, customs, and rules of interaction have evolved slowly and in unanticipated and unpredictable ways over many human lifetimes. Much of what is called human society and civilization is seen as “the result of human action, but not the execution of any human design” (to use the phrase coined by Ferguson and often quoted by Hayek).

Thus the British tradition of individualism had little confidence in the ability to plan society. And particularly because of man’s imperfections and foibles, these thinkers were reluctant to see power centralized in the hands of government. Far better to decentralize decision-making in the private competitive market so as to limit the potential damage from error and abuse.

In the alternative French tradition represented by thinkers such as Descartes, Hayek argued, there was a tendency toward hyper-rationality, a belief that man through his reason could understand clearly and definitely how to remake society. All social institutions and traditions not “provable” through logic and rational reflection to be “useful” or “good” were to be criticized and torn down. In their place would be constructed a new world according to a politically planned design. In many of his writings over the years, Hayek tried to show the “fatal conceit” in those who presumed to possess the knowledge and ability to reconstruct man and society in their own “enlightened” image.

From a different conceptual vantage point and with other interpretative purposes in mind, the historian Gertrude Himmelfarb offers a similar contrast between these two traditions in her recent book, The Roads to Modernity. She highlights those aspects of the French Enlightenment that emphasized the power of man’s reason to comprehend not only the natural world, but the social order as well. Superstition — and all religion in the eyes of many of these French thinkers represented superstition — blinded man from seeing the world as it really is. Pure reason could cut through the jungle of irrational tradition and custom to clear the way for man to remold society to his liking. But such reasoning was not open to all men, most of whom were mired in ignorance and unable to think clearly. An elite of enlightened thinkers could be trusted to design a utopia for mankind. Himmelfarb reminds us that such hubris led to the reign of terror and dictatorship in the wake of the French Revolution.

She points out that while the Enlightenment is often identified with this circle of French thinkers, there were two other eighteenth-century Enlightenment traditions, the British and the American. Himmelfarb argues that rather than being a cult of reason, the British tradition was concerned with understanding society and its foundations in the character and nature of men. Besides his unique reasoning quality, man also possesses a social and moral sense that makes him sensitive to the circumstances of his fellow human beings.

While the degree of religious faith varied among these British thinkers, they all believed that man’s potential for personal and social virtue was an outgrowth of and inseparable from an understanding of his relationship to a higher Being who breathed these qualities into the human character. This fostered a sense of individual responsibility and a spirit of benevolence and charity toward others that generated a vast array of voluntary philanthropic associations to assist in alleviating the hardships of the less fortunate in society. As Himmelfarb points out, this was neither inconsistent with nor antagonistic to a general acceptance of Adam Smith’s conception of a “system of natural liberty,” in which men normally interacted in a network of free-market commerce and exchange.

The unique quality of the American Enlightenment, she says, was its development of institutions for the preservation of political liberty. The constitutional order that the Founding Fathers produced encapsulated their vision of a system that would leave men free to pursue their personal and social virtues without the heavy-handed presence of political domination. She gives special attention to the extent to which the Founding Fathers considered that the spirit and practice of freedom were grounded in religious conviction.

Equally important, Himmelfarb points out the role that self-interest was seen to play in maintaining a free and good society.

She contrasts the ancient world’s notion of heroism and great men with the American ideal of ordinary free men learning and practicing virtuous conduct through the interplay of commerce and industry. The marketplace fosters good and moral conduct that establishes standards in social affairs which help maintain the health of a free society.

In the concluding chapter, Himmelfarb highlights those features that have made the American experience unique and which she thinks still undergird the character and conduct of the American people today. She surely underestimates the extent to which the interventionist-welfare state has undermined the spirit of self-responsibility that existed in America, say, a hundred years ago. She also seems not to see the extent to which the welfare state (some aspects of which she clearly supports) is fundamentally inconsistent with her ideal of free and virtuous people.

Nonetheless, her book offers a useful and often insightful appreciation of the far-more-enlightened British and American Enlightenment traditions, which have been unfairly overshadowed by the French tradition.