The anti-socialists.

Western liberals have discovered that socialism in the Eastern bloc didn't work. But conservatives from William Graham Sumner to Feodor Dostoyevsky had long shown it couldn't work -except by making a prison of society.

IT WILL, PERHAPS, be remembered as the supremely heroic achievement of Gorbachev's policy of glasnost that it has achieved what generations of Western anti-Communists failed to do: it has tom away the ideological veils of socialist systems and revealed the sordid realities of ubiquitous corruption, Third World living standards, environmental devastation, and economic ruin. In revealing these truths, the Soviet glasnost has only confirmed the prophetic insights of several generations of Western anti-socialist thinkers, who, although they accurately foretold the spiritual and material poverty produced by socialism, along with socialism's ultimate nemesis in war and famine, saw their works consigned by the Western academic class to an Orwellian memory hole. Glasnost has thereby earned these thinkers a nervous and grudging respect among a few liberal and socialist commentators.

For the most part, however, the writings of the antisocialists remain neglected or derided as doctrinaire tracts, rather than appreciated as sober pieces of analysis. As for developments in the Soviet bloc, they are interpreted by bien-pensant opinion as signs of the reformability of Communist institutions instead of unmistakable evidence of their terminal crisis. It seems that the distinction between the capacity of a system of institutions to reform and renew itself, and its liability to collapse, which was once part of political common sense, is now too fine and subtle for the liberal mind to grasp-at least in its applications to socialism. Indeed, it is safe to predict that, even when its debacle is complete and it has vanished from the world, socialism's ruinous inheritance will be explained by liberal opinion as the result of the historical and cultural disabilities of the peoples who were subject to its tyranny.

THE FIRST WAVE of anti-socialist thought emerged in the latter half of the nineteenth century in such writers as Sir Henry Maine W. H. Mallock, W. G. Sumner, and Herbert Spencer. Disparate as their outlooks were in important respects, they converged on a vital insight-that socialism, whatever its theoretical self-image, would in practice be a step backward from the achievements of modern civil society. The analyses of Maine and Spencer, while they invoke theories of historical development that can scarcely be accepted in their entirety, are especially illuminating. Sir Henry Maine summed up his critique of socialism in the famous dictum, Nobody is at liberty to attack several (or private) property, and to say at the same time that he values civilization." For Maine, as he shows in his books Ancient Law (1861) and Popular Government (1885), the history of the early modem period was a movement from a society of status to one of contract. The medieval order of ranks, hierarchies, and estates, in which individuals had little option but to accept the station into which they were born, gave way slowly but surely under the influence of the expansion of commerce to civil orders in which human relations were conducted by voluntary exchange under the rule of law. The tendency of popular democracy, and of its offspring in nascent socialist movements, was to turn back the clock of historical development and reinstitute a status-based society. This would be the inexorable outcome of the concentration of economic power in the socialist or interventionist state, with its consequent creation of a privileged caste of functionaries insulated from the disciplines of the market. Maine's insight that the domination of economic activity by the state cannot avoid creating a new sort of caste system based on possession of (or access to) political power strikingly anticipates theories of the New Class, as they have been developed in recent decades by neoconservative writers such as Irving Kristol and Daniel Bell and ex-Communists such as Milovan Djilas.

Spencer's analysis has much in common with Maine's-its central categories being those of the industrial and the militant society. The former are social orders based on voluntary cooperation among free men, endowed with private property and equal freedom. Such orders, Spencer believed, are inherently inimical to war and the domestic conflict of class strife, since they tend to benefit everyone via the processes of market competition. The inner logic of industrial society is to yield a global order of peace and prosperity, in which the natural evils of human life are progressively reduced. As against this optimistic scenario, however, Spencer discerned the ominous prospect of the re-emergence under the guise of socialism of the militant order. From being guarantors of free association among free men, states would themselves become hierarchical economic enterprises, supposedly devoted to the pursuit of the general welfare. Spencer's grim forebodings were evoked, not only by the socialist movements that sprang up in the last decades of the nineteenth century, but also by their counterparts in the interventionist new Toryism and Liberal Imperiahsm that emerged at the other end of the political spectrum in England, and by Bismarckian wellfarism and Realpolitik in Germany. All these developments, Spencer argued in The Man versus the State (1884), presaged a rebarbarization of the civilized world. Spencer's insights into the reactionary character of socialism were embedded in a larger synthetic philosophy of progress, evolution, and the evenescence, of imperfection which no one, I take it, can today find credible. But in perceiving that socialism would bring not peace but war, not abundance but poverty, not improvement but retrogression, decades before these perceptions were given a concrete historical object in Bolshevism, he deserves our respect and admiration.

OFTEN LINKED with Spencer as an advocate of Social Darwinism, William Graham Sumner was another prescient late-nineteenth-century critic of socialism and the interventionist state. A procritic writer, professor at Yale for over thirty years, and, at the end of his life, briefly president of the American Sociological Association, Sumner was a trenchant defender of "the Forgotten Man" the ever neglected victim of interventionist policies of inflationary finance: tariff, regulation, and welfarism. Although he was no great admirer of Spencer's larger synthetic philosophy, Sumner adopted and developed Spencer's evolutionary perspective on sociology and history, and embraced his distinction between militant and industrial societies. As with Spencer, Sumner's most readable books are not his monumental expositions of sociological theory (such as his Science of Society, published posthumously in four volumes), but instead such shorter, pithier books as What Social Classes Owe to Each Other (1883). Perhaps the most prescient of Sumner's critiques of expansionist government were his attack on plutocracy," by which he meant the use of wealth to acquire legislative privileges for producer groups, and, most particularly, his indictment of protectionism as a form of exploitation of the consumer-critiques all the more relevant today, when anti-capitalist legislation is likely to prevail in the United States through the back door of tariffs. Sumner is to be remembered for his defense of private capital and private property as guarantors of civil liberty and equal freedom, and for his insistence that intervention in the market economy, whatever its avowed intentions, cannot avoid exploiting the powerless for the benefit of the privileged.

W. H. Mallock is a still more neglected late-Victorian anti-socialist thinker. His transient fame rested on his satirical story The New Republic (1877), in which he introduced memorable prose portraits of characters easily recognized as prominent living men. In the 1880s and 1890s, Mallock produced a brilliant series of works on economics and government directed against then-fashionable radical and socialist doctrines, of which Classes and Masses'(1896) and Aristocracy and Evolution (1898) are among the most interesting. Mallock's thought remains important because, like H. L. Mencken, he recognized that capitalism and democracy might be at odds with each other, with the progressive dynamism of capitalist institutions being increasingly shackled by democratic egalitarianism. Belonging to that school of lateVictorian pessimists which included the legal thinkers A. V. Dicey and Walter Bagehot, who perceived in the rise of mass democracy a threat to economic freedom and individual liberty, Mallock challenges those conservatives in our time who see in democratic capitalism an harmonious system of institutions whose systematic tendency is to promote liberty.

New Wave

A SECOND WAVE of anti-socialist thought begins, also in the late nineteenth century, with the Austrian Eugen Bohm-Bawerk's classic Karl Marx and the Close of His System. In this seminal work, the major tenets of Marxist economics-the labor theory of value and the theory of exploitationare given a ruthless dissection and demolition that has not been surpassed in any later critique of Marxist thought.

For the critique of socialism as an economic system, however, we must turn to the later theorists of the Austrian school of economics, Ludwig von Mises and Friedrich von Hayek. it is in these writers, above all, that we find a conclusive statement of the argument that a socialist economy is virtually a contradiction in terms, in that it lacks the institutions which make economic calculation, and therefore a rational allocation of resources, possible. It is worth dwelling on the arguments of Mises and Hayek for a while, since they contain by far the best theoretical explanation of the structural reasons for the economic chaos generated by socialist planning institutions, without exception, everywhere they have been tried. In his books Socialism and Hurnan Action, Mises set out the fundamentaland insoluble problem of socialism as a problem of calculation. In any modern economy, the production of even a single good presupposes that a vast set of decisions about relative scarcities of resources and urgencies of preferences has been taken. Mises's point is that, in any real economy in which great amounts of capital and consumer goods are in production, the relationships of scarcity and urgency in resources and preferences will be so inconceivably complex as to generate insuperable problems of calculation for any planning authority. In an economy that possesses the institutions of market pricing, relative scarcities will be exposed in price data, which can then be used by the various producers and consumers as they make their countless decisions as to investment and consumption. When, as under the institution's of central economic planning, economic agents are deprived of the price signals in terms of which alone they are able to allocate their resources with any semblance of rationality, calculational chaos ensues, with all its attendant impoverishment. Even the mythical disinterested socialist manager will be at a loss as to how to conduct his enterprise, since any basis of calculation will have disappeared along with the suppression of market pricing. In practice, he will be compelled to rely on historical and global capitalist prices, and on prices in the parallel black and grey markets which everywhere mitigate the chaos of socialist central planning. These devices will diminish or retard, but not prevent or reverse, the progressive impoverishment that socialist institutions bring with them.

Hayek's argument against socialist central planning is subtly but profoundly different from that of Mises. For Hayek, the fundamental problem of central planning is one not of calculation but of knowledge. In any society, economic knowledge is widely dispersed in the beliefs and perceptions of millions of individuals. It is for the most part local knowledge of specific, and often fleeting, circumstances. It is often also practical knowledge, stored and used in the form of skills and habits, traditional expertise and entrepreneurial flair. It is not that, as for Mises, this dispersed knowledge, once collected by a central-planning authority, throws up so many problems of calculation that it proves to be usethat it cannot be collected at all, in virtue of its local, practical, and ephemeral character. The role of market pricing is, then, to act as a discovery procedure, an epistemic device whereby dispersed knowledge can be transmitted and utilized in a decentralized form.

For Ha k socialism is just one species of constructivist rationalism-the attempt to reconstruct society on a rational pattern, which our chronic ignorance always condemns to an ignominious failure. This is the argument against socialism that Hayek set out in the path-breaking essays collected in his book Individualism and Economic Order (1948)comprehensively dismissed in the West in the three decades following its publication, but now read avidly in Eastern Europe and wherever the long road from socialist serfdom is beginning to be traveled. Hayek's critique of the rationalist inspiration of the socialist project is echoed in the writings of his contemporary, Michael Polanyi. In Polanyi's statement of it, the argument against economic planning is on all fours with that against planning the growth of scientific knowledge-that it neglects, and tends to suppress or deplete, the stock of untheorizable tacit knowledge on which economic activity and science alike depend. Polanyi's claim is that, since we always make use of knowledge that we cannot state in theoretical terms, we always rely on knowledge of which we are ignorant: we always know more than we can say. The attempt to plan science-as envisioned by Marxist scientists between the wars-threatens to stifle scientific progress, just as the attempt to plan the economy produces economic retardation. In both cases, the project of subordinating practical activities reliant on tacit knowledge has a self-defeating effect, as Polanyi convincingly showed in his book The Logic of Liberty, and as Paul Craig Roberts has confirmed in his brilliant Polanyian study, Alienation in the Soviet Economy.

In the writings of Hayek and Polanyi, the narrow and instrumental critique of socialism developed by Mises is broadened and becomes a criticism of the hubristic ambitions of modern rationalism. This is not to say that incisive criticism of socialism is confined to critics of rationalism. Within the context of a rationalistic philosophy, the work of Ayn Rand contains some devastating insights into the moral psychology of socialist movements and societies. Miss Rand gives us a distinguished statement of the criticism of socialism made earlier by Nietzsche and Scheler, which identifies ressentiment, the animosity to nobility and virtue, rather than generosity or sympathy, as the animating sentiment of socialism. Ayn Rand's work is important, among other reasons, as a reminder of a once-important secular tradition of opposition to socialism, embodied in Britain in such figures as Charles Bradlaugh, and in America in H. L. Mencken and Frank Knight.

THE ANTI-SOCIALIST thinkers are an invaluable corrective to liberal illusion in that they show up the insuperable limitations of the socialist creed-its character as a reactionary revulsion against the individualist civil society that is the most precious achievement of Western civilization, the utopian unreality of central economic planning, and the ignoble sentiments that have often animated socialist movements. The predictions of the anti-socialists are amply corroborated by the history of our century, in which soft socialism, in Britain and (under the guise of intervention or regulation) in the United States, has produced economic stagnation and social conflict, while in the Communist bloc hot socialism has engendered catastrophe and a partial reversion to barbarism. The intellectual achievement of the anti-socialist thinkers is massive, yet it is recognized (if at all) only in the case of Hayek, whose subtle reasonings for the market as an epistemic device are now widely accepted. It remains to consider how the neglect of the anti-socialists by the mainstream of intellectual life is to be accounted for.

It is significant that even honorable and perceptive opponents of totalitarianism, who recognized its enmity to Western values, often failed to grasp that the socialist project was inherently totalitarian. So George Orwell, for all the brilliance of his insights, maintained to the last that, always provided it was democratic, socialism could respect basic human liberties. Like Sidney Hook, Orwell could not accept that comprehensive central planning, because it means the fusion of the economy with the state, is bound to destroy civil society and extinguish liberty. This lesson of the anti-socialists, and of the history of our times, is lost on these anti totalitarians, who even now suppose that a democratic form of socialism may arise from the ruins of Communism.

In part, no doubt, the built-in anti-capitalist mentality of the Western intelligentsia explains much of this. Because they are largely insulated from the market process, because they are inclined to despise the practical or tacit knowledge on which the market economy depends, and (not least) because the market does not confer upon them the rewards they believe they deserve, Western intellectuals are systematically biased against market institutions and in favor of collectivism. These factors render hopelessly naive any expectation that the global collapse of socialism (and now, perhaps, of social democracy, as in Sweden) will force the intelligentsia to acknowledge the achievements of free enterprise.

We fail to take the full measure of intellectual resistance to the collapse of socialism so long as we do not mark the character of socialism (and of liberalism in the forms it assumed in the French Enlightenment and in twentieth-century America) as a political religion that sought to supplant the inherited Judaeo-Christian faiths with a humanist and historicist theology. The socialist project, no less than the liberal project, was the construction of a political providence-a perfect, or indefinitely improvable, system of institutions that would deliver man from the mysteries and tragedies of the mortal lot. It is in this project of a political providence, and in rebellion against the imperfectibility of the human condition, that the ultimate inspiration of socialism is to be found.

A PROPHETIC DIAGNOSIS of the spiritual origins of modem socialism is to be found, not in any of the writers we have discussed so far, but in Dostoyevsky, and above all in his great novel The Possessed. There Dostoyevsky traces the socialist project to the atheist ambition of removing mystery and transcendence from the world, and creating a new world and a new humanity that is innocent of guilt and tragedy. Partly in virtue of his own pan-Slavist attachments, Dostoyevsky failed to see in the explosive compound of anti-capitalism and irreligion that was evidenced in the nihilist precursors of Bolshevism the source of the speculative frenzy that would all but destroy the Russian civilization he loved. He nevertheless dug deeper than any of the merely secular critics of socialism. The profundity of his diagnosis is well illustrated by recent events. Everywhere the incubus of socialism is being thrown off, there is at the same time, and for the very same reason, a renaissance of religious faith and practice. It is in the post-Communist countries, now at last emerging from decades of nihilist terror, that the character of socialism as a disorder of godlessness is most clearly perceived. In the West, no doubt, where the intelligentsia remains wedded to a sentimental and absurd religion of humanity, the roots of modem socialism in atheism will remain a taboo, well beyond the limits of Western liberal glasnost.