The political scene just now is so thoroughly disheartening that I beg the reader not to ask me to do the talking-head, trained-monkey routine of commenting in a witty fashion on the survivors of a train wreck.
At the risk of being judged escapist, I am devoting this column to insights and enjoyment derived from some books I read or reread so far this year.
If more people read books, maybe the elections would be worth writing about, eh?
Getting into Values
Since early this year I have been working with Prof. Herbert Walberg, chairman of Heartland’s Board of Directors, on a book about the usefulness of economics in finding the best way to reform the nation’s schools. A common refrain among defenders of government schooling is that markets cannot be trusted when it comes to “higher” goods, such as educating children or advancing virtues other than thrift and utility. Economists are accused of subordinating all other values to mere utility, and all motivations to rational choice.
To better understand what markets and economists are said to overlook, I started reading up on virtue. I sought first a shortcut, figuring I could find a working list of “virtues” in Mortimer Adler’s Ten Philosophical Mistakes, which I first read a decade ago. But Adler is coy on this topic, and refers the reader to Aristotle. Still searching for a shortcut, I spent a weekend reading parts of Adler’s two-volume The Idea of Freedom, which is magnificent, but it also doesn’t say much about virtue.
So I dusted off my college edition of Aristotle’s Works and reread, for the first time in 24 years, the Nicomachean Ethics. Wow! I’m still not sure he solves the “is versus ought” problem (Adler says he does), but he comes very close.
One can’t read Aristotle without grappling with the intellectual tradition that views virtue as the highest objective of politics. I found myself reading Richard M. Weaver’s Ideas Have Consequences and Leo Strauss’s Essays on the History of Political Philosophy. Every sentence reminded me of how much culture we have lost in the past half-century. Profoundly learned, difficult to read–can someone translate the French and Latin quotes for me?–and provocative, Weaver and Strauss present rigorous critiques of the sort of ahistoric and value-free libertarianism I have long found comfortable.
The Methodology of Economics
In order to defend economics, one must tackle the ongoing debates between Neoclassical, Austrian, and other schools.
Is economics, as Milton Friedman wrote in Essays in Positive Economics and Price Theory, an empirical science where hypotheses are validated when tested against historical data and found to be useful in making predictions? Or is it a deductive science, built on a priori principles, as argued by Ludwig von Mises in Human Action and other books? Or is it, as Deirdre McCloskey argues in The Rhetoric of Economics, merely a species of rhetoric? I found them all to be persuasive.
Searching for resolution, I read Richard L. Gordon’s Regulation and Economic Analysis: A Critique Over Two Centuries. The author, whom I surmise to be a curmudgeonly senior citizen about to retire from the economics faculty of a Midwest university, cuts through a lot of tall grass to reveal economics as a useful tool that is quite independent of the ideologies of its practitioners. His appendix on the pros and cons of the different schools gives each camp its due. He concludes that altogether too much time has been spent asking whether economics can be a science, when disagreement exists on how science should be defined.
I found a resolution to the dilemma in History of Economic Analysis by Joseph Schumpeter and an essay by James Buchanan in Israel Kirzner’s Method, Process, and Austrian Economics: Essays in Honor of Ludwig von Mises. Schumpeter argued that Austrians were embarrassingly weak in elaborating rigorous models (typically mathematical) of their theories, but they were right about the subjective nature of knowledge and the importance of time, which the neoclassical thinkers tried in vain to ignore. Buchanan gives Austrian economics credit for being the metaphysics of economics, while Neoclassical economics is a set of rules for solving real-world problems.
Can economics ever truly be a science? I marvel at Kenneth Boulding’s answer. In Economics as a Science, Boulding insisted economics is not only a social science but also an ecological, behavioral, political, mathematical, and moral science!
The History of Capitalism
While economists wax on about competition, consumer choice, and efficiency, many educators have movies playing in their heads featuring sweatshops, robber barons, and mass assembly lines. Little wonder they resist subjecting their profession to such a paradigm!
Much of this is the result of the leftist biases of most histories of the West. Until fairly recently, advocates of markets had only Friedrich Hayek’s Capitalism and the Historians and a few similarly slim volumes with which to debunk many of the myths planted firmly in the public’s mind by works of fiction by Dickens, Sinclair, Marx, and Engels.
More recently, conservatives have started writing history. Paul Johnson’s marvelous books, A History of the American People and Modern Times, and Nathan Rosenberg and L.E. Birdzell’s How the West Grew Rich, are great correctives.
Similarly, Ellwood P. Cubberley’s famous 1919 history of education, Public Education in the United States, tells a tale of public schools arising from a vast tarpit of ignorance and haphazard religious instruction. Only recently has a new generation of historians, such as Joel Spring, started to set the record straight on the rise of literacy before most schools were government-run, and the role of anti-Catholic bigotry in the spread of the “common school.”
One of the most exciting books I read this summer is Property and Freedom by Richard Pipes. Pipes is one of the world’s great historians of the former Soviet Union, exposing the regime’s butchery and barbarism at a time when many other writers (such as John Kenneth Galbraith) were still imagining it to be a model of efficiency and justice. Pipes’ latest book is more far-reaching, recording how freedom was won and lost starting in Athens in 400 BC and ending with the end of the 20th Century. He finds that property rights were everywhere and at all times the indispensable guarantor of freedom.
And More
Sometime along the way I read David Calderwood’s first novel, Revolutionary Language. David, a libertarian who lives in Rockford, Illinois, has written a marvelous story about a common man who finds himself confronted by the arbitrary and irrational power of government, and decides to do something about it.
I also read Hayek on Hayek: An Autobiographical Dialogue, a posthumously published collection of autobiographical notes and interviews presented chronologically that gives insight into Friedrich Hayek’s life. Especially fascinating is Hayek’s admission that “socialism might have discredited itself sooner” had his lifetime of advocacy not compelled it to abandon its original program of central management of the means of production. Does this mean my own efforts are counterproductive?
I’ve long been curious about the views of Murray Bookchin, a rare “anarcho-socialist” who opposes big government and capitalism. I just finished The Rise of Urbanization and the Decline of Citizenship, published in 1987, and give it a mixed review. The first two-thirds, in which Bookchin distinguishes “politics” from “statism,” is very good and harkens back to the kind of views held by Weaver and Strauss. The final one-third, though, is just silly Marxism.
I’m currently reading The Smoking Book, by Lesley Stern. The reviews called it a “celebration of smoking” (in case you are wondering why I bought it), but it turns out to be a highly stylized combination of diary and travelogue by a woman who eventually succeeded, after many attempts, to quit smoking . . . except that once a year she goes nuts and digs up the backyard trying to find her secret stash. Not recommended.
All and all, it’s been a great year for reading. What better time than this, when politics has gone mad, to visit with the greatest thinkers about permanent things?
