[107289] in Cypherpunks
H-WEB: D Horowitz on intellectual ethics, fashion & Hayek
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Robert Hettinga)
Fri Jan 8 18:00:36 1999
Date: Fri, 8 Jan 1999 17:37:33 -0500
To: cypherpunks@cyberpass.net
From: Robert Hettinga <rah@shipwright.com>
Reply-To: Robert Hettinga <rah@shipwright.com>
--- begin forwarded text
Date: Fri, 8 Jan 1999 15:27:46 EST
Reply-To: Hayek Related Research <HAYEK-L@MAELSTROM.STJOHNS.EDU>
Sender: Hayek Related Research <HAYEK-L@MAELSTROM.STJOHNS.EDU>
From: Hayek-L List Host <HayekList@AOL.COM>
Subject: H-WEB: D Horowitz on intellectual ethics, fashion & Hayek
To: HAYEK-L@MAELSTROM.STJOHNS.EDU
David Horowitz, "Marginalizing Conservative Ideas".
On the Web at:
http://www.frontpagemag.com/het/horowitz11-98.htm
Hyperlink: <A HREF="http://www.frontpagemag.com/het/horowitz11-98.htm">
Marginalizing Conservative Ideas</A>
>From the article
"PEOPLE WHO IDENTIFY WITH THE LEFT often ask the following question: How is
it possible for decent human beings not to be progressive like us? How can
they not share our concern for social justice or the better world we are
attempting to create? The answers offered by progressives are that
ignorance clouds the understanding of others and that social privilege
blocks their human responses. In the eyes of progressives, their
conservative opponents are prisoners of a false consciousness that prevents
them from recognizing human possibility. This false consciousness is
rooted in the self-interest of a ruling class (or gender, or race), which
is intent on defending the system that secures its privilege. In other
words, opposition to progressive agendas grows naturally from human
selfishness, myopia, and greed. To progressives, theirs alone is the
vocation of reason and compassion.
The Right has questions too: How is it possible for progressives to remain
so blind to the grim realities their efforts have produced? How can they
overlook the crimes they have committed against the poor and oppressed they
set out to defend? How can they have learned so little from the history
their ideas have engendered?
Progressives have a false consciousness of their own. Being so noble in
their own eyes, how could they not be blind? But this blindness also
springs from an insularity created by their contempt for those not gifted
with progressive sight. As a result, radicals are largely innocent of the
ideas and perspectives that oppose their agendas. The works of von Mises,
Hayek, Aron, Popper, Oakeshott, Sowell, Strauss, Bloom, Kirk, Kristol and
other anti- socialist thinkers are virtually unknown on the Left excluded
from the canons of the institutions they dominate and absent from the texts
they write. This silencing of ideological opponents in the areas of the
culture the Left controls has led to a situation which one academic
philosopher lamented as "the collapse of serious argument throughout the
lower reaches of the humanities and the social sciences in the
universities." The same judgment cannot be made about the excluded
conservatives who are forced by the cultural dominance of the Left (and by
the historic ferocity of the radical assault) to be thoroughly familiar
with the intellectual traditions and arguments that sustain it. This is
one reason for the vitality of contemporary conservative thought outside
the academy.
Following the collapse of the socialist empire the marginalization of
conservative ideas in the academic culture has been so pervasive that even
those conservatives whose analyses were dramatically vindicated by the
events continue to remain hopelessly obscure. As far back as 1922, Ludwig
von Mises wrote a 500-page treatise predicting that socialism would not
work. Socialist theorists, he wrote, had failed to recognize basic economic
realities that would eventually bankrupt the future they were creating.
These included the indispensability of markets for allocating resources,
and of private property for providing the incentives that drive the engines
of social wealth. Moreover, socialists showed no inclination to take
seriously the problems their schemes created: "Without troubling about the
fact that they had not succeeded in disproving the assertion of the liberal
school that productivity under socialism would sink so low that want and
poverty would be general, socialist writers began to promulgate fantastic
assertions about the increase in productivity to be expected under
socialism."
As close as any analysis could, Von Mises' warning anticipated the next 70
years of socialist history. Under the Soviet Union's central planning, the
Kremlin rulers were indeed unable to allocate resources rationally, or to
promote technological innovation, or to replace the profit motive with a
viable system of non-monetary "social" incentives. As a result, the
socialist economy was unable to keep abreast of the technological changes
that would catapult the West into the post-industrial era. The socialist
economy could not even create sufficient growth to feed its own people.
Once the breadbasket of Europe, Soviet Russia under socialist planning
became a chronic importer of grain, an economy of forced rationing and
periodic famine. The effect of socialist order was exactly as Von Mises
had predicted the generalization of poverty and the crippling of
productivity, so that Russia was unable to enter the information age and
compete economically with the West.
Although history has dramatically confirmed Von Mises' analysis, and just
as dramatically refuted his left-wing opponents, his intellectual
contributions are as unrecognized today as they were before the Communist
fall. While the intellectual tradition that gave rise to Von Mises=92
insights is marginalized in American universities, and its paradigm
ignored, Marxism and its variants flourish. The profusion of Marxists on
university faculties is, in fact, unprecedented, and the theories that
Marxism has spawned now provide the principal texts for the next
generations. While Von Mises' writings are invisible, the works of
Stalinists, ignorant of the most basic economic realities of how modern
societies function, are familiar to most undergraduates. In the humanities
and social sciences, the discredited tradition of Marxism has become the
intellectual well-spring of the main schools of current academic theory
critical studies, cultural studies, historicism, structuralism,
post-modernism, and radical feminism. The comparable schools of
conservative and libertarian thought are hardly extant within university
walls.
It is hardly necessary to add that no serious attempt has been made by
progressive intellectuals to re-visit Von Mises critique. Or to come up
with answers that would justify the respect now accorded to the bankrupt
intellectual tradition of the Left, or arguments that would warrant this
revived commitment to a discredited faith. Given the verdict of history
on the socialist experiments, Von Mises works and others that derive from
the tradition of classical liberalism should provide the central texts of
any respectable academic discourse. Instead they are so marginal to the
university curriculum, it is as if they had never been written.
In contrast to Von Mises fate, Stalinist intellectuals like Antonio
Gramsci, Eric Hobsbawm, and Walter Benjamin have become icons of the
left-wing professoriate, their writings re-issued in scholarly editions,
their texts well-thumbed by undergraduates, and their ideas developed and
refined in doctoral studies. Despite its dismal record of collusion and
failure, the tradition of the Left is intellectually dominant in the
American university today in a way that its disciples would never have
dreamed possible thirty years ago as though the catastrophes produced by
its ideas had never taken place.
Von Mises of course is not alone. His disciple, Friedrich Hayek to take
another representative example is equally obscure in the academic culture.
The theoretical edifice Hayek created is, like Von Mises , as comprehensive
as Marx s, and has been vindicated by the same history that has refuted
Marxist ideas. Hayek has even been awarded a Nobel prize in economics. Yet
the name Hayek is all but absent from the discourse of the Left, and from
the academic curriculum the Left has designed. Typically, Hayek s mature
works on capitalism and socialism are rarely if ever mentioned in the broad
intellectual culture, their arguments never confronted. The average
college graduate is acquainted with whole libraries of radical blather the
re- packaging by third-rate intellects of discredited Marxist formulas in
the works of bell hooks, Frederic Jameson, Derrick Bell, Andrew Ross,
Richard Delgado, and Catharine MacKinnon but has never opened a text by the
most important figures of twentieth-century social thought ,,, ".
David Horowitz, "Marginalizing Conservative Ideas" _Heterodoxy_. Nov. 1998.
Horawitz's essay was adapted from _Politics of Bad Faith: The Radical
Assault on America s Future_ by David Horowitz, recently published by The
Free Press.
Hayek on The Web is a regular feature of the Hayek-L list.
--- end forwarded text
-----------------
Robert A. Hettinga <mailto: rah@philodox.com>
Philodox Financial Technology Evangelism <http://www.philodox.com/>
44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA
"... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity,
[predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to
experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'
