A Critical Examination of Socialism.

W.H. MALLOCK is one of a number of arrestingly farseeing conservative thinkers whose works have been unpublished for generations. Russell Kirk now seeks to retrieve them for us in the Library of Conservative Thought, of which he is editor. The project embodied in such a library is well-conceived and timely, and Mallock is one of the band of almost forgotten conservative thinkers who is most deserving of resurrection. Remembered nowadays, if at all, only for his satirical work, The New Republic, which he published in 1877 at the age of 28, Mallock was a resourceful and versatile polemicist against socialism whose arguments have a force and resonance even in our post-socialist age.

His Critical Examination of Socialism, now republished by Transaction Books with an elegant and erudite introduction by Mr. Kirk, should be of particular interest in the United States, where it first appeared in 1907 as a postscript to a lecture tour of Mallock's. For, in an evolution of ideas that a dispassionate observer cannot help finding delightfully ironical, doctrinal socialism, with its core ideas of economic planning and wealth redistribution, is alive today only in the United States, having long since been abandoned in Europe. Indeed, were he alive today, Werner Sombart would be compelled to ask, not, Why No Socialism in America? but instead, Why Socialism Only in America?

Whatever the answer to this difficult question--and it must be said that nothing in Mr. Kirk's introduction diminishes the difficulty--Mallock's closely reasoned polemic contains a range of arguments against socialism that will repay careful study three-quarters of a century later, particularly in America. His principal argument is, perhaps, one that invokes a natural monopoly on Ability, and which conceives Ability as the chief source of wealth-creation. Though there is doubtless a good deal more to wealth-creation than Mallock suggests, the proposition that redistributional taxation, beyond a certain point, will destroy the incentives for wealth-creation is well supported by the history of European social democracy, in Sweden and elsewhere, where redistributionism resulted in stagflation and declining living standards.

This is of more than scholarly interest if, as seems likely, the United States is embarked on an anachronistic experiment in redistributionist taxation of a sort that would not now be contemplated by any European social-democratic party. If Mallock is right, the result can only be a massive fall in living standards in the United States, accompanied, in all likelihood, by a flight of capital abroad and by governmental measures to arrest further capital flight. It will be interesting to observe the process of immiseration by ill-conceived policies of wealth-redistribution, foreshadowed here.

Mallock's book contains much else that is of topical interest, including an incisive analysis of the limitations of democratic institutions that should be read by all those who imagine, contrary to most of the evidence of history, that there is some special affinity between democracy and capitalism. It seems more than doubtful, however, that socialism will remain the chief enemy of conservative values, even in America.

In his excellent introduction, Russell Kirk tells us that "conservatism is not a bundle of exhortations got up by a closet philosopher," since "the sources of conservative order" are not to be found in books but are in "custom, convention, continuity." Now this may have been true in Edmund Burke's day, or even in Mallock's, but it is manifestly false in our own. In our day, the genuine conservative tends to be a bookish theorist, if only because what little is left of "custom, convention, continuity" among us is, especially in America, saturated with modernist and antinomian sentiment. The historical reality, in other words, is not now that--as it was perhaps in Burke's time--of a handful of speculators, bent on disturbing the peaceful slumbers of a tradition-bound and pious people. It is of a rudderless and anomic population, which vents its inordinacies in talk shows and rap music, and to whom the ideas of custom, convention, and continuity are alien and barely intelligible.

The paradox of our time, on which the conservative project may well founder, especially in America, is that the very idea of conventional or traditional behavior is one which has hardly any echoes in ordinary experience and that figures chiefly in the nostalgic dreams of an alienated and beleaguered conservative intelligentsia. Let us hope that subsequent volumes of Mr. Kirk's admirable Library of Conservative Thought assist us in addressing this notable paradox of conservatism in our age.

Mr. Gray is a Fellow of Jesus College, Oxford. This review was written during a period of residence as Stranahan Distinguished Research Fellow at the Social Philosophy and Policy Center, Bowling Green State University, Bowling Green, Ohio.