Utopia: Dream into Nightmare

Utopia: Dream into Nightmare

A former lecturer in philosophy at Tufts College, Dr. Winston has written extensively in the field of history. His most recent book is No Man Knows My Grave: Privateers and Pirates, 1665-1715.

Plato fathered the first blueprint of a planned society, and his descendants still clasp us in a sticky embrace while they rifle our freedoms. His Republic mapped out a spartan state run by benevolent philosophers, defended by a secondary caste of warriors, and supplied with the necessities of life by a mass of farmer artisans whose only political role was to obey. He did away with two obstacles to the ordered state: private property and the family. In the Republic each citizen performs that task for which he is fitted; the lowly toiler’s ignorance is his bliss; and all parts of the body politic function together in well-oiled harmony.

Thomas More’s Utopia (Greek for "noplace") in 1516 gave the name to this whole type of literature. A spate of others followed: Andreae’s Christianopolis (1619), Campanella’s City of the Sun (1623); Bacon’s New Atlantis (1627), to cite a few; then a growing flood rising from the French Revolution and spreading amidst the industrial turmoil of the nineteenth century (Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward, 1888, being the most popular); and on to our own day in such projections of the future as H.G. Wells’ Modern Utopia (1905) and B.F. Skinner’s Walden Two (1948).

They number by the score, and their variety in detail is as great. The majority rely on rule by an aristocracy of merit, a few try to preserve a modicum of democracy; most are communistic, but one at least (Hertzka’s Freelands, 1890) recognizes self-interest as basic and aims to save capitalism by restraint on overproduction. They may be secular or religious, agricultural or industrial, favorable to education or distrustful of it, resolutely egalitarian or frankly hierarchical.

Common Assumptions

However, certain elements of these multiform visions emerge with such frequency that they deserve our attention. The utopian pictures a static society in which careful planning solves every major problem of human life. Faith is placed in a collectivity that owns or controls all property. Competition for markets or jobs vanishes. Family ties diminish, and the rearing of children by the state is taken for granted. Everything is rationally ordered by those most capable of doing so: Plato’s guardians, More’s king and his advisers, Bacon’s Solomon’s House scientists, Bellamy’s industrial council, Wells’ austere samurai, Saint-Simon’s Council of Newton, Campanella’s quartet of superior men, Skinner’s panel of psychologists.

In utopia everyone works, the women on equal terms with the men. Hours are short — four to six daily—and retirement as early as age fifty, but the wants of the people have a stoic simplicity, and all enjoy a decent living. There is little to quarrel over, the atmosphere is uniformly brotherly, crime is almost unknown and disease rare — a perfect whole of perfect parts, all supremely content. "Utopia," the noplace, is plainly "eutopia" the happy place.

But how to get there? Utopians had no answer to that, and avoided the question. They sprang their flawless states fullarmed from the inkpot, always somewhere else — a distant island, an obscure wilderness, another planet — or at a dim future time. The transition from a callous, exploitive society, its people already deformed by prevalent evil, to one of affection and universal sharing, struck the utopians dumb. Their residue of hope rested in a double view of human nature. They mixed these two elements at will, for each one favored a regeneration of man’s sorry existence. In one they saw man fundamentally good (but perverted by a debasing environment); in the other they saw man quite plastic, molded to the last detail by his surroundings. Either way, the right society would very quickly set men right.

A combination of circumstances after 1800 convinced social idealists that the time was ripe for bringing heaven to earth. The French Revolution had produced a new crop of theorists, the long hours and short pay of the early factory system promised to grind down the poor, and overseas the American republic offered a haven for all who wanted to try something better than mankind had ever known. "Our fathers have not seen it," said Saint-Simon; "our children will arrive there one day, and it is for us to clear the way for them."

American Experiments

The result was more than 130 attempts to establish utopian societies in the United States during the nineteenth century. A ferment of change filled the air, even in staid New England. "We are all a little wild here with numerous projects of social reform," Emerson wrote to Carlyle. "Not a reading man but has a draft of a new community in his waistcoat pocket." Many of the settlements were European in origin as well as theory; some seeking escape from religious persecution, others imbued with recent secular plans for utopia; but all drawn by the cheap land of the American frontier and the easy tolerance of the young republic that had thrown off the shackles of old Europe and considered itself the vehicle of the new age. At last the utopians had before them something very like the fabulous island of the old dreamers. In America they could found minuscule states, as self-sufficient as possible, based on common ownership of property, filled with the brotherly spirit, and isolated from contamination by the outside world. "Our ulterior aim," said young Charles Dana of Brook Farm, "is nothing less than heaven on earth."

As might be expected, some of these starry-eyed experiments were simply preposterous. At Fruitlands that "tedius archangel" Bronson Alcott would not harness workhorses to the plow (unnatural), nor allow sugar (reaped by slaves), nor wear woolen cloth (robbed from sheep), nor spread manure on the fields (filthy stuff), nor burn whale-oil lamps (from slaughtered whales). Shakers led by an illiterate factory girl hailed as "Ann the Word" were strictly celibate, and regulated the lives of the faithful down to such details as what shoe to put on first in dressing, and which trouser leg to step into. An irresistible little fellow in Michigan got himself proclaimed James I of Zion by 2,000 adherents and five wives; "King Benjamin" of the House of David announced that he was the younger brother of Jesus Christ; the final verdict in the early days of the Amana settlement rested with an oracular Werkzeug whose utterances came straight from God; the ruler of a Florida colony taught that we all live inside the earth, our feet on its inner surface. The Lake Erie  Brotherhood of the New Life gave major attention to the sisterhood, in the belief that: "Soul-life and sex-life are at one, In the Divine their pulses run."

Robert Owen and Charles Fourier

Founders of other perfectionist settlements were more sincere and a bit less silly. Robert Owen, a successful English textile manufacturer, believed community of property essential to the good life, and was sure that the individual is totally shaped by his environment. In 1825 he bought up the extensive holdings of a religious community that was moving from Harmony, Indiana. The 900 who flocked in at his open invitation seemed to Owen’s son a "heterogeneous collection of radicals, enthusiastic devotees to principle, honest latitudinarians and lazy theorists, with a sprinkling of unprincipled sharpers thrown in." Owen’s communal system gave full vent to their shabby ways. They couldn’t run anything properly—flour mill, saw mill, tannery or smithy—and their only solution to problems of production was to write another constitution or make another speech. The industrious soon tired of supporting the idle. From the Nashoba, Tennessee Owenite settlement, leader Frances Wright informed Owen that "cooperation has nigh killed us all," and departed. Within two years every Owenite venture, fourteen in all, disintegrated.

Disciples of the unsmiling Frenchman Charles Fourier set up no less than twenty-seven American experiments. Fourier based his utopian ideal less on man’s malleability than on his fundamental goodness. The twelve passions, which he carefully listed and classified, would act in perfect harmony with each other and with society as a whole if given a chance. Let people gather into phalanxes" of some 2,000 members, housed communally in one huge "phalanstery" lying in a spread of 1,600 acres owned in common. Let each choose the work he wished to do. Pay the highest wage for disagreeable but necessary labor, less for the more attractive, and least for work that was downright pleasurable. Bring all goods produced to a single warehouse, where they could be purchased with worktickets. In Fourier’s ample vision all mankind would finally be gathered into three million phalanxes, coordinated by an Omniarch in Constantinople.

Fourier-inspired communes quickly died of dissension, ineptitude, and sheer tomfoolery. An attempt to use some Fourier principles dealt the final blow to the most charming and humane of all the utopian experiments, Brook Farm. The Farm was owned in shares; it intended to support itself by voluntary labor at an equal wage for all (ten cents an hour), and have plenty of time left over for culture. Some choice souls sought refuge there: The Rev. George Ripley, founder; Nathaniel Hawthorne, who soon discovered that forking manure ten hours a day was not conducive to literature; George Curtis, later to edit Harper’s; and Isaac Hecker, a humble German who became a priest and instituted the Paulist Fathers. Good families sent their boys down to be prepared for Harvard at the Farm school.

Into this idyllic but financially precarious community of like minds swept a voluble enthusiast for Fourier, Albert Brisbane. He convinced them that their happy anarchy wouldn’t work. They must organize. Tasks were specialized on Fourier principles; a Sacred Legion took on the dirtier jobs; unequal wages replaced equal pay; work became compulsory; uneducated artisans came in with their ignorant and sharp-tongued wives; and before long the genial spirit that had held Brook Farm together evaporated. Six years after its beginning in 1841 the Farm was sold to West Roxbury (Mass.) for an alms house, thus passing, in the words of one observer, from "the highest ideal" to "the lowest actual."

Two That Remain

Two utopian communes have the distinction of remaining, though much altered, to the present day. In 1848 John Humphrey Noyes settled fifty one Perfectionists along Oneida Creek near Utica, New York, an area so filled with fiery religious fanatics that wits called it "the burned over district." A slab chinned fellow with a scraggly beard and bleating voice, Noyes was nevertheless personally impressive, and a canny manager of people. He quipped that too many agricultural communes had "run aground," and set out to make Oneida industrial. The growing membership (an average of 250) canned farm produce for the market, made traveling bags and a special type of steel trap, spun silk, silver plated dinnerware, and prospered.

Noyes’ word was law. He rested it on divine inspiration, and exerted pressure so gently that no one thought him despotic. The individual at Oneida had no life apart from the community — property in common, personal acts under common scrutiny, sexual sharing on the theory that monogamy was un-Christian "claiming." The women said that they belonged to God first and Noyes next, an order of precedence that they in fact reversed. A system of selective breeding called "stirpiculture" admitted only the most fit to parenthood. Children lived apart, rarely seen by their parents.

For thirty years Oneida adhered to the original plan. By 1880 Noyes had aged; the religious spirit that he had evoked flickered; the young revolted at the idea of sharing spouses and surrendering their children. The commune converted to a joint stock company in an effort to avoid collapse, but its old habits were too ingrained. In 1890 P.B. Noyes, one of the founder’s "stirpiculture" sons (he sired ten) saved the community by transforming it into a typical well run American business. He concentrated on silverware, cut costs, emphasized teamwork, hustled, advertised, and competed. Today Oneida differs in no essential from any other enlightened manufacturing firm.

Where Oneida chose industry, the Amana community of Iowa remained rural, and even more pervasively religious. Eight hundred Germans of the "True Inspiration" sect established it in 1854 on 26,000 choice acres, seven villages spread in a circle around the central one. Every member surrendered all his capital to the common fund (if he left, he got it back with interest) and in return was guaranteed his necessities for life. Under the rule of church elders the maxim, "obey, without reasoning, God, and through God your superiors," kept members in line. Amana supplied its own needs — weavers, cobblers, tailors, watchmakers, pharmacies, print shop — and exported only high grade woolen cloth. As much as possible the members ignored the world around them, even hiring outsiders to serve in the hotel lest their own girls be corrupted.

By 1900 Amana’s piety had waned. Without the invigorating spur of competition the economy lagged badly. In 1932 it became a joint stock company intent on profit. A business manager brought in from the outside trimmed the labor force of its hired hands, closed shops that had run at a loss for years, eliminated fifty two inefficient dining halls, sold businesses into private hands and houses to their occupants. Still quaint and quiet today, Amana is a producing and marketing cooperative, without a vestige of its former communism.

American experiments that went under in two years, as many did, had too large a proportion of misfits whose record outside was one of steady failure. Intimacy bred discord, as people living too close together bumped each other at every turn. The absence of competition resulted in lethargy. None of these eccentrics had any business sense; the purchase of a 300-acre tract in Pennsylvania, for example, was made in midwinter snows by an artist, a doctor and a cooper, and turned out to be rocklands and that had to be abandoned in a year. The Ruskin colony in Tennessee (1894) was ruined by an agent who took such pleasure in making a sale that he sold regularly at a loss. Occasionally plain chicanery was too much for the innocent: the Rev. Adin Ballou lost his "miniature Christian republic" at Hopedale when one of his Christians bought up enough shares to force everyone else out. Worse, the utopians misread human nature. "If men were angels," remark the Federalist Papers, "no government would be necessary." The utopians discovered to their sorrow that men are not angels now, nor can be so shaped.

Displaced by the Welfare State

While these sad little failures gathered dust, Americans awoke to the fact that in the welfare state of the western democracies, and more explicitly in communist Russia, utopia had already arrived on a massive scale. The results in this country stirred up a general unease. Every step that added to the individual’s security detracted from his liberty; every move toward the better life exacted its toll. The United States government assumed vast new powers to tax, spend — and regulate the affairs of its citizens. Mass production and the communications media created a bland uniformity, with the flesh and blood breadwinner converted into a Social Security number. Welfare programs that averted gross poverty also robbed the individual of his initiative. Women’s equality did much to skyrocket divorce. The same technological advance that increased abundance polluted the landscape. Nuclear energy was more bomb than blessing. Parents did all they could to make a heaven on earth, and their children kicked them in the stomach for the effort.

The West edged piecemeal toward the planned society; Russia made it in a leap. Marx had revived the utopian dream and promised its fulfillment: abundance of consumer goods, universal happiness, absolute equality, peace at home and abroad, government that would hardly need to govern — a perfect whole of perfect parts. Liberals who had been beguiled by this splendid vision shuddered at the actuality. In Russia the government clamped an iron grip on the people and showed no inclination to let go. Everything was in short supply except armaments. The mildest critic of the regime was branded a traitor, and shipped off to Siberia. Art and science became tools of the Party; news media spewed nothing but the official line; and the calculated lie became a habit. The planned society, dreamed of through the ages, turned out to be the police state.

Americans who had believed in a steady march to the promised land now quailed at the prospect. Once they had yearned for utopia; now they asked themselves, "What can we do to prevent it?"

Antiutopian novels clanged like warning bells in the night. Eugene Zamiatin’s We (1920) was among the first, and dozens followed (if we include science fiction), notably Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (1932), Vladimir Nabokov’s Bend Sinister (1947) and George Orwell’s 1984 in 1949. They draw a frightening picture of the planned society: its ruthless manipulation by the rulers of the ruled, its grey-faced homogeneity, its stifling of creative change, its reduction of man to a producing and consuming animal, its hideous distortion of truth. Once the masters of this nightmare society are in the saddle, few can escape or even want to.

Human nature, in these anti-utopias, is infinitely malleable; men can be taught to kiss their chains.

Are we all doomed to this? There is reason to doubt it. The anti-utopian sounds a needed alarm, but he badly overplays his hand. He regards the individual as an empty sack into which any rubbish can be poured. Even the lonely rebels of anti-utopian novels are spineless, stupid, or both. D503 of We can build a cosmic machine, but is otherwise a bumbling idiot; Bernard in Brave New World is a sniveling coward; Smith in 1984 is a perverter of truth by vocation and a lovesick ninny on the side; the renowned philosopher Kruger in Bend Sinister has a backbone of rope. In anti-utopia western man has thrown away every vestige of his hard-won rights, to gain a bovine placidity. All the world is content to chew its cud.

Common Sense May Prevail

Such a view undoes history. Western man has shown himself far too stubborn, restless and plain cussed for any such fate. Once the common man has had a full taste of speaking his mind, no one can shut him up for long. Once he is used to the ballot, and the exhilarating experience of throwing the rascals out, he can be deprived of it only under the most extraordinary conditions. Once real power is firmly established at the base of the political pyramid (as it never was in Russia or China), tyranny from the top becomes an outside chance.

This may be faith, but it is a faith worth having. A man’s essence is his hazardous freedom. It is built in, inexpugnable. For it he has fought wars, rioted, hidden in catacombs, gone to the stake, killed kings, languished in prison, and he does not forget. Freedom disrupts old orders, and sometimes gives the impression that everything nailed down is coming loose, but as long as Americans demand it as their right, the horrors of the police state will stay beyond our borders.

***

Umpire

In general, nothing happens except a change in the weather, unless somebody makes it happen. Under a free economic system, the man who makes things happen is called an enterpriser. With his own savings or savings borrowed from others, he goes into farming, manufacturing, mining, or banking, and begins producing goods or moving them around. That much is basic.

Thomas Nixon Carver, the economist, said the reason many countries are backward is that there was nobody who cared to invest in them. Either the government itself was predatory, or thieves and robbers roamed unmolested. In such countries the rich keep their wealth in the form of unproductive goods — gold and jewels — which they can hide and easily transport when things get too tough.

If a nation wants production and prosperity, the persons to encourage are the enterprisers. Not only should they be encouraged to build and produce, but they should be assured that their property and a decent part of their gains are protected against confiscation. If they lose part or all of their savings in the competitive game, they must take the loss and shut up. Government’s main job is to see that the rules are fair and are enforced.

FROM The William Feather Magazine, November, 1971 

Alexander Winston

This article was originally published on FEE.org. Read the original article.

It's Getting Better All the Time - 100 Greatest Trends in the Last 100 Years

It's Getting Better All the Time: 100 Greatest Trends in the Last 100 Years

It’s not for nothing that economics is tagged “the dismal science.” Part of that reputation traces to its realistic no-pie-in-the-sky nature, but another part goes to the ongoing influence of thinkers like Thomas Malthus, who saw population outracing food output; Karl Marx, who saw evil capital crushing the rising working class; and John Maynard Keynes, who saw government demand-management as the only way to beat unemployment and the business cycle. (For the record, David Levy has shown that Thomas Carlyle coined the term “the dismal science” not for reasons such as those, but because the practitioners of economic science opposed racial slavery. See Ideas on Liberty, March 2000.)

More recently, noneconomists like biologist Paul Ehrlich of Stanford University, Lester Brown of the World Watch Institute, and presidential candidates Ralph Nader of the Green Party and Pat Buchanan of the Reform Party have jumped on the World-Is-Going-To-Hell bandwagon.

Here’s how Newsweek reported on “Global 2000,” a 1980 multimillion-dollar U.S. government study authorized by President Jimmy Carter: “The year: 2000. The place: Earth, a desolate planet slowly dying of its own accumulating follies. Half the forests are gone; sand dunes spread where fertile lands once lay. Nearly 2 million species of plants, birds, insects, and animals have vanished. Yet man is propagating so fast that. . . .” Well, you get the flavor of “Global 2000”; it was caught in a bumper sticker of that day: “Stop the Planet! I Want to Get Off!”

Pessimist Ehrlich has been especially wrongheaded. In 1969, on the very eve of the Green Revolution of zooming farm productivity, he foresaw that hundreds of millions of people “will starve to death,” including tens of millions in the United States. Somehow he won a MacArthur Foundation “genius” award.

Enter optimist—and realist—Julian Simon (1932–1998). Economist Simon had the annoying habit of confronting the doomers and gloomers with hard facts. He concluded that population literature was wrong, that there is no “population bomb,” that we are not running out of resources, that human beings are not only consumers but producers, and that they are indeed our “ultimate resource.”
In 1980 Simon made a famous bet with Ehrlich that the prices of any five natural resources would fall ten years hence. Ehrlich leaped at the chance—and in 1990 had to pay up.

Enter too, Stephen Moore, long a research associate of Julian Simon, and today a brilliant young economist and thinker in his own right. He prevailed on the Cato Institute to complete and publish Simon’s unfinished manuscript. The two authors set the central premise that there was likely more improvement in the human condition in the twentieth century than in all previous centuries combined.
Through more than 100 color data charts, each supported by about a page of text, they maintain that compared to previous generations, we Americans are in the great majority healthier; live longer; are richer; can afford to buy far more things; have better jobs; earn higher pay; have more time for recreation, travel, sports, and the arts; have bigger and better homes; are at much less risk from catastrophic accidents; and breathe cleaner air and drink safer water. They also show that black Americans have shared in the prosperity and that the income gap between blacks and whites is closing, as is the income gap between men and women. The authors note that at the start of the twentieth century almost no women went to college; today women are more likely to attend college than are men.

And so on and on go the upbeat trends, a welcome breath of fresh air in the dark ruminations on the dismal science. For opinion polls show that many Americans still fret about the human prospect. They regard technological change as a net negative development, worry that the income gap between the rich and the poor is wider than 100 years ago (not so), and fear that the environment is worse mainly because of the automobile (forgetting that the horse pulling a buggy or wagon was a far greater polluter than the auto). Ben Wattenberg titled his 1984 book The Good News Is The Bad News Is Wrong, and Moore and Simon succeed in proving that that really is the case.

Yes, there are also some unfavorable trends, found where government policy holds sway. Social indicators such as divorce and out-of-wedlock births are grim. Taxes are higher and government much bigger. Educational quantity is way up, but its quality is way down. Rita Simon, Julian’s widow, a faculty member at American University and author of the foreword to the book, notes that the twentieth century saw the rise of Nazism, Stalinism, and Maoism but also their fall; that in side-by-side comparisons, South Korea has been far more prosperous than North Korea, West Germany than East Germany, and Taiwan than mainland China. Government control, so often prescribed by the gloom-and-doom set, has been a dismal failure.

Maybe market economics should be renamed “the enriching science.”

William Peterson, an adjunct scholar at the Heritage Foundation, is a contributing editor to Ideas on Liberty.

William H. Peterson

William H. Peterson (1921-2012) was an economist, businessman and author who wrote extensively on Austrian Economics. He completed his PhD at New York University in 1952 under the supervision of Ludwig von Mises. 

This article was originally published on FEE.org. Read the original article.

Victor Hugo: Liberty and Justice For All

Victor Hugo: Liberty and Justice For All

Literary lion Victor Hugo inspired an outpouring of generous sympathy for wretched people oppressed by government. He chronicled the evils of police power. He spoke out against capital punishment. He denounced taxes and tyrants. He opposed war. He expressed confidence in the ability of free people to achieve unlimited progress.

He was a leading light for liberty during the nineteenth century because of his prodigious and often lyrical output: nine novels, ten plays, and about 20 volumes of poetry, plus essays and speeches. He broke away from the suffocating formality of classical French literature and achieved the immediacy of plain talk. He wrote with high moral purpose about dramatic events and created great heroes of world literature. He enjoyed popular acclaim like no previous author in history.

Hugo’s most beloved work, Les Misérables, nails government as a chronic oppressor. He shows poor people being helped not by government but by the charitable works of a private individual. He tells why a resourceful entrepreneur is an engine of human progress. He celebrates revolution against tyranny, while making clear why egalitarian policies backfire. His hero Jean Valjean does good voluntarily, peacefully.

Hugo fan Ayn Rand, whose novels about heroic individualism have sold more than 20 million copies, told biographer Barbara Branden: “Les Misérables was the big experience. Everything about it became important to me, holy, everything that reminded me of it was a souvenir of my love. It was my first view of how one should see life, wider than any concretes of the story. I didn’t approve of the ideas about the poor and the disinherited, except that Hugo set them up in a way that I could sympathize with; they were the victims of government, of the aristocracy, or established authority. The personal inspiration for me was that I wanted to match the grandeur, the heroic scale, the plot inventiveness, and those eloquent dramatic touches.”

To be sure, some contemporary friends of liberty weren’t as impressed. Alexis de Tocqueville, author of Democracy in America, thought Hugo an “unruly genius.” Lord Acton, among the most respected scholars on liberty, distrusted the blazing eloquence “that nobody but Hugo strives after now. . . . Some of these Frenchmen live on nothing else; and if one plucks them, or puts their thoughts into one’s own language, little remains.”

Hugo, though, courageously backed his convictions with action. In 1822, when he was 20, he defended Vicomte Francois- Réné de Chateaubriand, a famed French author who fell out of favor with the government. A childhood friend named Délon was hunted by police, presumably for his republican politics, and Hugo offered his house as a sanctuary. During the Revolution of 1848, Hugo went from one insurgent stronghold to the next, ducking gunfire all the way, urging an end to violence.

Hugo committed himself to the cause of liberty late in life, when he had the most to lose. As a youth, he had supported the French monarchy, and later he admired Napoleon Bonaparte for supposedly upholding the principles of liberty and equality. When Hugo was 49, he publicly defied tyrannical Emperor Napoleon III. As a consequence, Hugo lost his luxurious homes, his vast antiques collection, and splendid library of 10,000 books, but he emerged as an eloquent exile who championed liberty for people everywhere.

Like Jean Valjean in Les Misérables, Hugo helped the poor by going into his own pocket. He started at home, providing for his estranged wife and his sons who didn’t earn much money on their own. He instructed his cook to feed beggars who showed up at his front door. Every other Sunday for about 14 years, he served “Poor Children’s Dinners” to about 50 hungry youngsters in his neighborhood. His diaries abound with examples of personal charity. For example, March 9th, 1865: “Soup, meat and bread for Marie Green and her sick child.” March 15th: “Sent a set of baby-linen to Mrs. Oswald who has just been brought to bed.” April 8th: “Sheets to Victoire Etasse who is lying in, and without bed-linen.” According to biographer André Maurois, personal charity accounted for about a third of Hugo’s household expenses during his peak earning years.

Hugo was such an idol that his portrait engraving was sold at practically every bookstall in Paris. He had an athletic figure about five feet, seven inches tall. His trademarks were a vast forehead and intense light brown eyes. Early in his career, his long brown hair was brushed back in waves. In later years, his hair turned white, he had it cropped short and grew a moustache with a neatly trimmed beard.

Commitment and Energy
If Hugo wasn’t an original thinker, he brought intense commitment and self-confidence to the cause of liberty. Literary critic Charles-Augustin Sainte-Beuve observed that when Hugo “grabs an idea, all his energy pushes at it and concentrates on it, and you hear arriving from afar the heavy cavalry of his wit and the artillery of his metaphors.” As Hugo himself declared, “Nothing is so powerful as an idea whose time has come.”

Victor Hugo was born February 26, 1802, in Besancon, France. He was the third child of Sophie Trébuchet, a sea captain’s daughter. An admirer of Voltaire, the witty eighteenth-century French critic of religious intolerance, she apparently never had Victor baptized. His father, Joseph-Léopold-Sigisbert Hugo, had quit school to enlist in the army of the French Revolution, displayed unusual ability, and became a major-general under Emperor Napoleon Bonaparte.

Victor Hugo experienced a tumultuous childhood. His parents went their separate ways, and there was a long, bitter custody battle as the children were shuttled back and forth in England, Italy, and Spain. After Napoleon’s downfall, the family had to scramble for a living.

Hugo dreamed of a literary career, but in 1821 his mother died. She left a mess of debts, and his father disapproved of his ambition which was likely to mean tough times. “I shall prove to him,” Victor told his older brother Abel, “that a poet can earn sums far larger than the wages of an Imperial general.” At the time, Hugo struggled to live on two francs a day.

Work
Hugo worked in an austere room with plain rugs, plain draperies, and no wall decorations. He stood while writing at a polished wood desk secured to a wall. He started work soon after 8:00 in the morning and continued until 2:00 in the afternoon. After a substantial lunch, he wrote from 4:00 to 8:00. Then he changed clothes and did work-related reading for three hours. By 11:00 PM, he was ready for a light meal with his wife and friends. “My colleagues spend their days visiting each other, sitting and posing in cafes, and talking about writing,” he remarked. “But I am not like them. I write. That is my secret. What I achieve is done by hard work, not through miracles.”

Hugo’s first collection of poems was published in 1822. Then came a succession of poetic works which put Hugo in the forefront of the romantic movement, exploring emotions with melodrama and exuberant style. He ventured into politics with a poem saluting young French revolutionaries who, in July 1830, had toppled King Charles X after he began restricting individual rights.

Hugo became increasingly infatuated with heroic personalities, Napoleon above all. When Bourbon officials insulted three of Napoleon’s aging marshals, Hugo wrote “Ode a la colonne de la Place Vendome,” a poem bursting with patriotic fervor. It caused quite a stir. Then Hugo wrote a play that idealized Oliver Cromwell, England’s seventeenth-century Puritan military dictator who ordered the beheading of a king. The play wasn’t produced, in part, because it was an obvious target for censorship.
Hugo resolved to succeed in the theater. Censors interpreted his first play, Marion de Lorme, as a slap at Charles X, and the production was shut down. Hugo responded by writing Hernani, discreetly set in sixteenth-century Spain, about a heroic rebel against authority. A lyrical melodrama, it opened at the Comédie Francaise on February 25, 1830, and reportedly enjoyed the most enthusiastic reception since the acclaimed plays of Voltaire a century earlier. Government censors feared that closing it down would provoke an uproar. Two years later, censors did shut down Hugo’s next hit play, Le Roi s’amuse, which included an unflattering portrayal of Francois I, among the most famous of French kings. Giuseppe Verdi, Italy’s outstanding opera composer who had turned Hernani into an opera (Ernani), called Le Roi s’amuse “the greatest drama of modern times,” and it became the basis for his popular opera Rigoletto.

Hugo had already set his sights on writing fiction. His first novel, Bug-Jargal (1826) was a melodrama about blacks rebelling in Santo Domingo, and though critics considered it trash, the public loved it. Then, inspired by the novels of Englishman Walter Scott, Hugo wrote a medieval epic of his own: the anti-royalist Notre-Dame de Paris (1831) about the hunchback Quasimodo who falls in love with the gypsy heroine Esmeralda. The intensity of feeling and vividness of language captivated readers throughout the Western world. “Hugo,” wrote literary critic Théophile Gautier, “is the greatest of living French poets, dramatists and novelists. He has no peer.”

“Ideas Are My Sinews and Substance . . .”
Hugo was a shrewd observer of life around him. “Ideas are my sinews and substance,” he remarked. “I must use them to earn my living and to make my continuing mark in the world, so I husband them, and never fritter them away. An observation, a feeling, even a fleeting sensation, all these are the precious marrow which compels me to stand at my writing desk.”

Meanwhile, Hugo’s wife, Adele—they had been married in 1822—was bored with poetry, plays, novels, and their three children. By 1831, she had begun an affair with literary critic Sainte-Beuve. She refused to continue relations with Hugo, and he launched an extraordinary succession of affairs. Most were short-lived, but one—with actress Juliette Drouet—began in February 1833 and endured until her death a half-century later. Four years younger than Hugo, she had long black hair, violet eyes, a slim figure, and considerable knowledge of French literature. He paid her substantial debts, she became utterly loyal, copied his manuscripts, and performed other secretarial work. “I look on you,” he wrote, “as the most generous, the worthiest and the noblest of all. . . .”

He plunged into political controversies. He had already written Le Dernier Jour d’un condamné (Last Day of a Condemned Man), a polemic against capital punishment. King Louis-Philippe named Hugo a peer, which meant he became member of the French Senate and could participate in political deliberations. The French Revolution of 1848 overthrew Louis-Philippe, and in December there was to be an election for President of France. Hugo and a newspaper he edited backed Louis-Napoleon, who had a magical name although apparently he wasn’t related to Bonaparte.

Having won, Louis-Napoleon conspired for absolute power. Government thugs smashed printing presses and newspaper offices. The government sent soldiers to Italy where they defended the Pope’s power against republicans. Hugo, who had romanticized charismatic leaders, recognized the evil of political power. He became the leading voice of opposition to Louis-Napoleon. He ridiculed the President as “Napoleon le Petit”—“Napoleon the Little.” Louis-Napoleon imprisoned Hugo’s sons Charles and Francois-Victor. In December 1851, Louis-Napoleon disregarded a law limiting the President to one term and declared himself Emperor Napoleon III. Hugo formed a Committee of Resistance, but the Emperor’s soldiers crushed all opposition and went hunting for Hugo.

Exile
Juliette Drouet arranged a safe house, disguised him as a shabby laborer, provided a passport for a new identity, and on December 11th got him aboard a night train for Brussels. She followed two days later. By becoming a political exile, Hugo forfeited virtually all his assets. Moreover, his royalty income had exceeded 60,000 francs a year, and it was illegal for French publishers to continue sending him checks. He soon proved too controversial for the Belgians who were trying to maintain good relations with Napoleon III. Hugo and his entourage settled on the Channel Isle of Guernsey, and that became his home for the next 14 years.

Hugo earned good money from his political writings. Les Chatiments (Castigations), a 6,000-line poem, garnered him 75,000 francs, so he was able to pay 10,000 francs for Hauteville House. It was a magnificent four-story manor. He resumed his rigorous work routine in the solarium with unbleached linen curtains, a plain rug, and a slab of wood hinged to the wall for his standing desk. As a defiant exile, Hugo wrote in the tradition of intellectual rebels like Rabelais and Voltaire.

After a morning of intense work, Hugo had a “light meal” consisting of paté, omelet, or fish, then roast beef, lamb, pork, or veal with potatoes and several other vegetables, salad, English puddings, cheese, and a different wine with each course. He did his serious eating at dinner which included a dozen or two oysters, soup, fish, perhaps roast chicken, then a hearty meat dish like Beef Wellington, salad, and a rich dessert such as chocolate mousse, followed by perhaps a half-dozen oranges. He remained in reasonable shape because everyday, regardless of harsh weather, he spent a couple of hours hiking along Guernsey’s rugged coast.

From Guernsey came one literary triumph after another. In 1859, Hugo published La Légende des siecles (Legend of the Centuries), an epic poem about the struggle for liberty and human progress. He denounced French King Louis XIV as a tyrant, celebrated the English defeat of the Spanish Armada and portrayed Napoleon III as a frog.

Napoleon III made a public appeal for French exiles to return, but Hugo defiantly responded: “I swore that I would remain in exile until the end, either my own or that of Napoleon le Petit.” The Times of London declared “We are proud that Victor Hugo elects to live on British soil, which is enriched and nourished by his presence.” The New York Tribune added, “His voice is that of free men everywhere.”

Hugo began speaking out more about liberty. He denounced the December 1859 execution of John Brown, who tried to foment slave revolts in Virginia. He encouraged the efforts of Giuseppe Garibaldi to establish a liberal democracy in Italy. “Liberty,” Hugo told a thousand people gathered on the Isle of Jersey, “is the most precious possession of all mankind. Food and water are nothing; clothing and shelter are luxuries. He who is free stands with his head held high, even if hungry, naked and homeless. I dedicate my own life, whatever may be left of it, to the cause of liberty—liberty for all!”

Les Misérables
Hugo turned to a project long simmering in his mind. This was a novel tentatively titled Miseres for which he started making notes in 1840. From 1845 until work was interrupted by another French Revolution on February 21, 1848, he pushed ahead with it, changed the tentative title to Jean Trejean and put aside the manuscript. On April 26, 1860, he went to the tin trunk where he had stored the manuscript and resumed work. “I have spent almost seven months in thinking over and clarifying in my mind the whole work as I first conceived it,” he noted, “so that there might be complete unity in what I wrote twelve years ago and what I am going to write now.” He suspended his twice-a-day feasts, and his pen was ablaze. He wrote about two-thirds of the book in 1861. He finished Les Misérables on May 19, 1862.

The book chronicles the phenomenal saga of Jean Valjean, a peasant imprisoned 19 years for stealing a loaf of bread and breaking free from prison. He manages to escape again, adopts a new identity, and redeems himself through peaceful commerce, creating a successful manufacturing business which helps an entire region prosper. He builds schools and distributes a substantial part of his wealth to the poor. He rescues Cosette, an impoverished girl, from a monstrously abusive foster father and raises her himself. Despite abundant good works, Valjean is trailed by ruthless police inspector Javert who is intent on returning him to prison. He flees with Cosette, the business closes, and the region plunges into depression. When Valjean finds himself in a position to kill his tormenter Javert, he lets the inspector go free. Meanwhile, Cosette falls in love with Marius, a revolutionary republican who becomes severely wounded amidst the failed Paris uprising of 1832. Valjean saves him from police by carrying him through the only available escape route—the dangerous sewers of Paris. Marius marries Cosette, Valjean confesses to Marius that he is an old convict, and the horrified Marius banishes him from the household, which brings on his final illness. But just before Valjean dies, everyone is reconciled as Marius learns the full story about the man’s saintly deeds.

While Les Misérables exudes generous sympathy for the most wretched among us, Hugo stood apart from the socialist trend of his time. He seemed to be countering the Marxist dogma of class warfare when he wrote “There has been an attempt, an erroneous one, to make a special class of the bourgeoisie. The bourgeoisie is simply the contented portion of the people. The bourgeois is the man who has now time to sit down. A chair is not a caste.”

Hugo pressed his attack: “Communism and agrarian law think they have solved the second problem [distribution of income]. They are mistaken. Their distribution kills production. Equal partition abolishes emulation. And consequently labour. It is a distribution made by the butcher, who kills what he divides. It is therefore impossible to stop at these professed solutions. To kill wealth is not to distribute it.”

Hugo expressed confidence that private enterprise and peace would alleviate poverty: “All progress is tending toward the solution. Some day we shall be astounded. The human race rising, the lower strata will quite naturally come out from the zone of distress. The abolition of misery will be brought about by a simple elevation of level.”

Hugo decided to have Les Misérables brought out by Albert Lacroix, a Brussels publisher whom he considered a good businessman. The contract called for Hugo to receive a million francs—one-third upon signing, one-third in six years, and one- third in 12 years. The book was perhaps the first international publishing event, going on sale simultaneously in Amsterdam, Leipzig, London, Paris, New York, and other cities. Within a decade, it was published in some 40 countries. In 1874, full rights reverted to Hugo, and he authorized inexpensive editions. Altogether, some seven million copies of the book sold during the nineteenth century. With Les Misérables, Hugo earned more money than any author before.

Hugo continued to focus on novels. In 1866, he produced Les Traveilleurs de la Mer (Toilers of the Sea), about a heroic fisherman who struggles against the elements. In 1869, Hugo wrote L’Homme qui rit (The Man Who Laughs), a historical romance about a kidnapped English boy reared by gypsies, who exposes the failure of ruling elites.

Hugo spoke out anew as Napoleon III intervened in the affairs of other countries. Napoleon’s military adventure in Mexico backfired. He got into a war with Prussia, and Prussian soldiers advanced toward Paris. Napoleon III abdicated September 4, 1870. Hugo gathered together his family and arrived in Paris the following day. He had gained some weight during his exile, there were circles around his eyes, and he sported a white beard, but his free spirit was still unmistakable.

Return to France
Thousands of people lined the streets as Hugo’s carriage made its way to his new residence. There were shouts of “Vive la République!” and “Vive Victor Hugo!” Vendors openly sold his polemical poetry, and popular actresses like Sarah Bernhardt held public readings of it, donating the proceeds to help defend France against the Prussian onslaught. Hugo wrote a prophetic letter to the Germans, which urged that they make peace and warned that humiliation of France would trigger venomous hatred and ultimate defeat of Germany. Germany’s “Iron Chancellor” Otto von Bismarck disregarded Hugo’s appeal, Paris surrendered on January 29, 1871, and a half-century later embittered Frenchmen celebrated Germany’s ruin during the First World War.

In February 1871, Hugo was elected a Deputy to the National Assembly of the French Third Republic. He railed against the humiliating settlement which involved French surrender of most of Alsace-Lorraine to Prussia, but it was ratified by a war-weary majority. Hugo denounced socialists who attempted a violent takeover and conservatives who struck back with fury.

Through all this, Hugo continued his disciplined writing. His most notable work in France—his last novel—was Quatre-vingt-treize (Ninety-Three), a drama focusing on the climactic year of the French Revolution. His hero Gauvain was a liberal republican who courageously opposed the Terror. Ayn Rand wrote an enthusiastic introduction to a reprint because the book was about individuals committing themselves to moral values, and because Hugo had inspired much of her own work.
During his last years, Hugo was depressed by the death of his sons, but in other respects he had a grand time. He continued to arise at dawn and write till midday. L’Art d’etre grand-pere (The Art of Being a Grandfather [1877]), his collection of sentimental poems, further enhanced his popularity. Hugo had more romantic adventures. His personal fortune surpassed $1,400,000, an enormous sum in those days. He entertained as many as 30 dinner guests nearly every night. As Hugo began his 80th year, February 26, 1881, he was honored with a National Festival, a celebration the likes of which had never been seen for a private individual—some 600,000 admirers paraded by his opulent residence, 130 Avenue d’Eylau, in the Champs Elysées quarter, leaving huge mounds of flowers.
Nothing, however, could restore his spirits after the death of his beloved Juliette, of cancer, May 11, 1883. She was 77. Then on May 15, 1885, Hugo got what seemed like a bad cold. It turned out to be pneumonia. He was wracked with fever and struggled to breathe. He died around 1:30 in the afternoon, May 22nd, at 83. He was placed in a pauper’s coffin, as he had requested, and set beneath the Arc de Triomphe. Then an estimated 2 million people watched as a mule cart carried him to his resting place at the Panthéon. He was buried beside Voltaire.

Since Hugo’s time, his reputation outside France has endured with a single novel—nearly all his other novels, plays and poems forgotten. But that novel, of course, is Les Misérables, which has touched more hearts than ever. In 1978, French composer Claude Michel-Schonberg and lyricist Alain Boublil began work on a musical production of Les Misérables. On October 8, 1985, it opened in London, and two years later, on March 12, 1987, it came to Broadway. “A thrilling musical experience,” declared Time magazine. Les Misérables has played in Australia, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Israel, Japan, the Philippines, Poland, Singapore—22 countries altogether. Some 41 million people have seen this inspiring story of liberty and justice for all, Victor Hugo’s most precious gift to the world.

Jim Powell

Jim Powell, senior fellow at the Cato Institute, is an expert in the history of liberty. He has lectured in England, Germany, Japan, Argentina and Brazil as well as at Harvard, Stanford and other universities across the United States. He has written for the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Esquire, Audacity/American Heritage and other publications, and is author of six books.

This article was originally published on FEE.org. Read the original article.

The Shadow University: The Betrayal of Liberty on America's Campuses

The Shadow University: The Betrayal of Liberty on America's Campuses

Many books have discussed political indoctrination on American campuses, but none is as thorough and damning as this one. Alan Kors, a history professor at the University of Pennsylvania, and Harvey Silverglate, a criminal defense attorney and civil liberties litigator, present overwhelming evidence that the loss of liberty on campuses is far greater than most people realize. Speech codes, which punish students and faculty for offensive or “harassing” speech, are ubiquitous. Due process is the exception rather than the rule: secret judicial proceedings routinely deny accused faculty and students the right to be represented by legal counsel, to confront or call witnesses, and to have an impartial judge and appeals process. Most chilling of all, “sensitivity training,” a.k.a. thought reform, tells students what to believe and labels them as “in denial” or as “oppressors” unless they profess the politically correct orthodoxy about race, gender, and so on.

Most people, even critics of political correctness, are unaware of this system because much of it happens outside the classroom. To see the destruction of liberty on American campuses one must also examine offices of student life, residential advisers, judicial systems, deans, freshmen orientation, and the promulgation of rules and regulations. These aspects of the university are inescapable for students (and increasingly for faculty), and punishment for violating its rules occurs behind closed doors. Hence the book’s title: The Shadow University.

Kors and Silverglate rip the veil off this system, revealing far more cases than have hitherto been reported. Besides providing compelling narratives of various assaults on liberty, the authors also cogently explain the basic moral and constitutional principles of free speech and academic freedom, due process, and freedom of conscience, which are routinely violated throughout academia. A hallmark of their violation is the double standard: provocative speech (such as “born again bigot,” “Uncle Tom”) by the politically correct is protected, but those who appear to criticize feminism, affirmative action, or other reigning orthodoxies may be censored and/or re-educated.

I’ll sketch only a few of the incredible cases: a (white) student at the University of Pennsylvania calls noisy (black) students “water buffaloes” and is charged with racial harassment; a professor at Dallas Baptist University criticizes feminist arguments, is charged with defamation, and is then fired, along with the dean who defended him; a student at Sarah Lawrence is sentenced to sensitivity training for “homophobia” for laughing at a remark made about a gay student; a Catholic residential adviser at Carnegie Mellon University is fired for refusing to wear a symbol in support of gay and lesbian students; freshmen orientation at Williams College requires everyone to gather in a dark auditorium where insults are hurled at them from all directions; a professor at Cornell University is found guilty of sexual harassment at a hearing that he is forbidden to attend or call witnesses, and where the head of the investigating committee says “we have to make the rules as we go along.”

How did this arise? Bad ideology plus careerist administrators, answer the authors. The bad ideology is New Left theorist Herbert Marcuse’s argument in his 1965 essay “Repressive Tolerance,” that the marketplace of ideas masks repression of “progressive” ideas. To prevent the silencing of these ideas, “reactionary” ideas must be censored. This zero-sum view of freedom is followed by today’s defenders of speech codes and other assaults on liberty. (However, the authors give no evidence that today’s censors were influenced by Marcuse.) As for administrators, they perform their jobs in hopes of moving on to a more prestigious position, often at a new campus. To move on, their reign must be relatively untroubled, which means they aim to appease groups who can cause trouble: militant feminists, blacks, and gays. Sacrifice of other people’s freedom doesn’t matter.

I wish the authors had dug deeper on the careerism issue. They remark that colleges and universities have taken on many of the trappings of large corporations, minus the accountability, but they do not discuss whether re-establishing accountability requires that colleges become proprietary institutions.
Kors and Silverglate suggest two strategies for restoring liberty. First, litigate. Court challenges to university oppression frequently succeed. State universities are bound by the First Amendment and the requirements of due process; private universities are contractually bound to keep their promises of free inquiry and procedural fairness. Second, publicize oppression: Universities hate publicity. Publicity can shame the university into change, and/or arouse freedom-minded colleagues to revolt.
This is a great book, and that’s not hyperbole. It is not an enjoyable topic, but one indispensable for anyone concerned with liberty in academia. I am in awe of the authors. It must have taken enormous energy, intellectual focus, and a burning passion for justice to uncover this massive oppression on American campuses. All lovers of liberty are in their debt.

Daniel Shapiro

Daniel Shapiro is Professor of Philosophy at the University of West Virginia.

This article was originally published on FEE.org. Read the original article.

David Hume on the Origin of Government

See also The Philosophy of Hume, Voltaire and Priestley - Over 170 Books on DVDrom

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See also Nothing is More Surprising than the Easiness with Which the Many are Governed by the Few - David Hume

Man, born in a family, is compelled to maintain society from necessity, from natural inclination, and from habit. The same creature, in his further progress, is engaged to establish political society, in order to administer justice, without which there can be no peace among them, nor safety, nor mutual intercourse. We are, therefore, to look upon all the vast apparatus of our government, as having ultimately no other object or purpose but the distribution of justice, or, in other words, the support of the twelve judges. Kings and parliaments, fleets and armies, officers of the court and revenue, ambassadors, ministers, and privy counsellors, are all subordinate in their end to this part of administration. Even the clergy, as their duty leads them to inculcate morality, may justly be thought, so far as regards this world, to have no other useful object of their institution.

All men are sensible of the necessity of justice to maintain peace and order; and all men are sensible of the necessity of peace and order for the maintenance of society. Yet, notwithstanding this strong and obvious necessity, such is the frailty or perverseness of our nature! it is impossible to keep men faithfully and unerringly in the paths of justice. Some extraordinary circumstances may happen, in which a man finds his interests to be more promoted by fraud or rapine, than hurt by the breach which his injustice makes in the social union. But much more frequently he is seduced from his great and important, but distant interests, by the allurement of present, though often very frivolous temptations. This great weakness is incurable in human nature.

Men must, therefore, endeavour to palliate what they cannot cure. They must institute some persons under the appellation of magistrates, whose peculiar office it is to point out the decrees of equity, to punish transgressors, to correct fraud and violence, and to oblige men, however reluctant, to consult their own real and permanent interests. In a word, obedience is a new duty which must be invented to support that of justice, and the ties of equity must be corroborated by those of allegiance.

But still, viewing matters in an abstract light, it may be thought that nothing is gained by this alliance, and that the factitious duty of obedience, from its very nature, lays as feeble a hold of the human mind, as the primitive and natural duty of justice. Peculiar interests and present temptations may overcome the one as well as the other. They are equally exposed to the same inconvenience; and the man who is inclined to be a bad neighbour, must be led by the same motives, well or ill understood, to be a bad citizen or subject. Not to mention, that the magistrate himself may often be negligent, or partial, or unjust in his administration.

Experience, however, proves that there is a great difference between the cases. Order in society, we find, is much better maintained by means of government; and our duty to the magistrate is more strictly guarded by the principles of human nature, than our duty to our fellow-citizens. The love of dominion, is so strong in the breast of man, that many not only submit to, but court all the dangers, and fatigues, and cares of government; and men, once raised to that station, though often led astray by private passions, find, in ordinary cases, a visible interest in the impartial administration of justice. The persons who first attain this distinction, by the consent, tacit or express, of the people, must be endowed with superior personal qualities of valour, force, integrity, or prudence, which command respect and confidence; and, after government is established, a regard to birth, rank, and station, has a mighty influence over men, and enforces the decrees of the magistrate. The prince or leader exclaims against every disorder which disturbs his society. He summons all his partisans and all men of probity to aid him in correcting and redressing it, and he is readily followed by all indifferent persons in the execution of his office. He soon acquires the power of rewarding these services; and in the progress of society, he establishes subordinate ministers, and often a military force, who find an immediate and a visible interest in supporting his authority. Habit soon consolidates what other principles of human nature had imperfectly founded; and men, once accustomed to obedience, never think of departing from that path, in which they and their ancestors have constantly trod, and to which they are confined by so many urgent and visible motives.

But though this progress of human affairs may appear certain and inevitable, and though the support which allegiance brings to justice be founded on obvious principles of human nature, it cannot be expected that men should beforehand be able to discover them, or foresee their operation. Government commences more casually and more imperfectly. It is probable, that the first ascendent of one man over multitudes began during a state of war; where the superiority of courage and of genius discovers itself most visibly, where unanimity and concert are most requisite, and where the pernicious effects of disorder are most sensibly felt. The long continuance of that state, an incident common among savage tribes, inured the people to submission; and if the chieftain possessed as much equity as prudence and valour, he became, even during peace, the arbiter of all differences, and could gradually, by a mixture of force and consent, establish his authority. The benefit sensibly felt from his influence, made it be cherished by the people, at least by the peaceable and well disposed among them; and if his son enjoyed the same good qualities, government advanced the sooner to maturity and perfection; but was still in a feeble state, till the further progress of improvement procured the magistrate a revenue, and enabled him to bestow rewards on the several instruments of his administration, and to inflict punishments on the refractory and disobedient. Before that period, each exertion of his influence must have been particular, and founded on the peculiar circumstances of the case. After it, submission was no longer a matter of choice in the bulk of the community, but was rigorously exacted by the authority of the supreme magistrate.

In all governments, there is a perpetual intestine struggle, open or secret, between Authority and Liberty, and neither of them can ever absolutely prevail in the contest. A great sacrifice of liberty must necessarily be made in every government; yet even the authority, which confines liberty, can never, and perhaps ought never, in any constitution, to become quite entire and uncontrollable. The sultan is master of the life and fortune of any individual; but will not be permitted to impose new taxes on his subjects: a French monarch can impose taxes at pleasure; but would find it dangerous to attempt the lives and fortunes of individuals. Religion also, in most countries, is commonly found to be a very intractable principle; and other principles or prejudices frequently resist all the authority of the civil magistrate; whose power, being founded on opinion, can never subvert other opinions equally rooted with that of his title to dominion. The government, which, in common appellation, receives the appellation of free, is that which admits of a partition of power among several members, whose united authority is no less, or is commonly greater, than that of any monarch; but who, in the usual course of administration, must act by general and equal laws, that are previously known to all the members, and to all their subjects. In this sense, it must be owned, that liberty is the perfection of civil society; but still authority must be acknowledged essential to its very existence: and in those contests which so often take place between the one and the other, the latter may, on that account, challenge the preference. Unless perhaps one may say (and it may be said with some reason) that a circumstance, which is essential to the existence of civil society, must always support itself, and needs be guarded with less jealousy, than one that contributes only to its perfection, which the indolence of men is so apt to neglect, or their ignorance to overlook.

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When the Irish were Slaves, 1890 Article

When the Irish were Slaves, article in The Month 1890

See also: When Blacks Owned Slaves, by Calvin Dill Wilson 1905 and A History of White Slavery by Charles Sumner 1853

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"Among the first to be sent were children. Some were dispatched by impoverished parents seeking a better life for them. But others were forcibly deported. In 1618, the authorities in London began to sweep up hundreds of troublesome urchins from the slums and, ignoring protests from the children and their families, shipped them to Virginia. England’s richest man was behind this mass expulsion. It was presented as an act of charity: the ‘starving children’ were to be given a new start as apprentices in America. In fact, they were sold to planters to work in the fields and half of them were dead within a year. Shipments of children continued from England and then from Ireland for decades. Many of these migrants were little more than toddlers. In 1661, the wife of a man who imported four ‘Irish boys’ into Maryland as servants wondered why her husband had not brought ‘some cradles to have rocked them in’ as they were ‘so little’." White Cargo: The Forgotten History of Britain's White Slaves in America by Don Jordan and Michael Walsh

"Slavery they can have everywhere. It is a weed that grows in every soil." - Edmund Burke

Start of: When the Irish were Slaves, article in The Month 1890

There is (another) phase of British slavery, the traffic in white slaves. Mr. Froude gives proof of a sale of Spaniards at Dover in 1571:

The extraordinary spectacle was actually witnessed, of Spanish gentlemen being disposed of openly in Dover market at a hundred pounds apiece, and being kept in irons at the court-house till their friends could purchase their liberty.

But this was a manifestly exceptional case. Nevertheless, the legal "penal servitude" was for a long period literal slavery, especially in the case of those transported to America and the West Indies. The earliest History of the Island of Barbadoes, by Richard Ligon, gentleman, published in 1673, gives a graphic account of the island when that gentleman visited it in 1647, less than two years before the execution of Charles the First. He says:

The island is divided into three sorts of men, viz., masters, servants, and slaves. The slaves and their posterity, being subject to their masters for ever, are kept and preserved with greater care than the servants, who are theirs but for five years, according to the law of the island. So that for the time the servants have the worst lives, for they are put to very hard labour, ill lodging, and their diet very slight . . . Upon the arrival of any ship that brings servants to the island, the planters go aboard; and having bought such of them as they like, send them with a guide to his plantation; and being come, commands them instantly to make their cabins, which they, not knowing how to do, are to be advised by other of their servants, that are their seniors; but if they be churlish, and will not show them, or if materials be wanting, to make them cabins, then they are to lie on the ground all that night ... If they be not strong men, this ill lodging will put them into a sickness; if they complain, they are beaten by the overseer; if they resist, their time is doubled. I have seen an overseer beat a servant with a cane about the head, till the blood has followed, for a fault that is not worth the speaking of; and yet he must have patience, or worse will follow. Truly, I have seen such cruelty there done to servants, as I did not think one Christian could have done to another.

Mr. Ligon tells a story which shows that this servitude was not merely an allotment to a master, but the "servants" actually became his property, so that he could sell them again.

There was a planter in the island that came to his neighbour, and said to him: "Neighbour, I hear you have lately bought good store of servants out of the last ship that came from England, and I hear withal, that you want provisions. I have great want of a woman-servant, and would be glad to make an exchange; if you will let me have some of your woman's flesh, you shall have some of my hog's flesh." So the price was set a groat a pound for the hog's flesh, and sixpence for the woman's flesh. The scales were set up, and the planter had a maid that was extream fat, lasie, and good for nothing; her name was Honor. The man brought a great fat sow, and put it in one scale, and Honor was put in the other; but when he saw how much the maid outweighed his sow, he broke off the bargain, and would not go on. Though such a case as this may seldom happen, yet 'tis an ordinary thing there, to sell their servants to one another for the time they have to serve; and in exchange receive any commodities that are in the island.

These passages show only too clearly what was the fate that awaited not only felons, but those who were shipped out to the plantations as "servants." In the case of those who would now be called political prisoners, the term of five years' service was extended indefinitely, as will shortly be seen.

There is a curious passage in Ligon's book, which shows that some remnant of the old Catholic idea that Christians could not be made slaves of, still remained among these planters. A slave to whom Ligon had explained a compass was so impressed with his superior knowledge that he declared his intention of becoming a Christian; "for he thought to be a Christian, was to be endowed with all those knowledges he wanted."

I promised to do my best endeavour; and when I came home spoke to the master of the plantation, and told him that poor Sambo desired much to be a Christian. But his answer was, that the people of that island were governed by the laws of England, and by those laws we could not make a Christian a slave. I told him my request was far different from that, for I desired him to make a slave a Christian. His answer was, that it was true there was a great difference in that; but being once a Christian, he could no more account him a slave, and so lose the hold they had of them as slaves, by making them Christians; and by that means should open such a gap as all the planters in the island would curse him. So I was struck mute, and poor Sambo kept out of the Church, as ingenious, as honest, and as good a natured poor soul as ever wore black or eat green. 

This scruple as to holding Christians in slavery does not seem to have disturbed the Puritans, who probably did not regard Catholics as Christians.

As early as 1618, one Owen Evans caused great consternation in Somersetshire by pretending a commission "to press maidens to be sent to the Bermudas and Virginia."

Records are noted such as these: "Hope shortly to send 200 English to be exchanged for as many negroes." Under Cromwell, the Council of State (1649) are "informed that 170 Irish have been taken at sea. Desire them to treat with those who trade to the English plantations to transport the common men thither, where their services may be made use of." By order of Council of State, "liberty to be given to Henry Hazard and Robert Immans of the city of Bristol, merchants, to carry 200 Irishmen from any port in Ireland to the Caribee Islands, and to Robt. Lewellin, of London, merchant, to have 300 men." "For a licence to Sir John Clotworthy to transport to America 500 natural Irishmen."

Licence to merchants of Boston to "pass to New England and Virginia, where they intend to carry 400 Irish children; directing a warrant to be granted, provided security is given to sail to Ireland, and within two months, to take in 400 Irish children, and transport them to those plantations."

When Cromwell found that it was impossible to carry out his original design of extirpating the whole Catholic population of Ireland, he adopted the expedient of allowing the chieftains to expatriate themselves with a certain number of followers. According to Sir William Petty, thirty-four thousand officers and men enlisted in the armies of France, Spain, Austria, and the republic of Venice. Their wives and children were next to be disposed of, and the same author tells us that not less than six thousand boys and women were transported to the West Indies, where Lynch says they were sold for slaves. His words are:

They sent away to the most remote part of the Indies many droves of old men and youths, a vast multitude of virgins and matrons, that the former might pass their lives in hard slavery, and the latter maintain themselves even by their own prostitution. . . . Many priests are sent away to the islands of the Indies, that they might be sold by auction, and be set to the most degrading offices and employed in twisting tobacco.

The number of exiles has never been ascertained. . . . After this drain the morality of the Irish people was protected by the following article of the Irish Republican Commissioners: "That Irish women, as being too numerous now, be sold to merchants, and transported to Virginia, New England, Jamaica, or other countries, where they may support themselves by their labour. (Porter, p. 292.)

The Editor quotes a letter on the state of Ireland (1652— 1656) by Father Quin, S.J.:

Whole cargoes of poor Catholics are shipped to Barbadoes and the islands of America, that thus those, whom shame prevents from being murdered by the sword, may fall under the doom of perpetual banishment. Sixty thousand, I think, have already been shipped; the wives and children of those who were banished in the beginning to Spain and Belgium are now sentenced to be transported to America.

It is most difficult to get authentic information about these unfortunate exiles. Mr. Maurice Lenihan says:

Father O'Hartegan, who brought to Limerick the standards taken by Owen Roe, had been the agent of the Confederation at the Court of France. . . . We know nothing of Father Hartegan till the year 1650, when 25,000 Irishmen, sold as slaves in St. Kitts and the adjoining island, petitioned for a priest. Through the Admiral du Poenry, the petition was placed in Father Hartegan's hands. He was a Limerick Jesuit. He volunteered himself, and disappeared from our view. As he spoke Irish, English, and French, he was very fit for that mission, which was always supplied with Irish Jesuits from Limerick for more than a hundred years afterwards. It is thought that Father Hartegan assumed the name of De Stritch, to avoid giving umbrage to the English; for, in the year 1650, according to letters written five years after the petition, an Irish Father De Stritch was welcomed and blessed by the Irish of St. Kitts, heard the confessions of three thousand of them, then went disguised as a timber merchant to Montserrat, employed numbers of Irish as woodcutters, revealed his true character to them, and spent the mornings administering the sacraments and the day in hewing wood, to throw dust in the eyes of the English.

The same writer adds:

Before we leave the Irish slaves, we may say one word more about their missionaries. In 1699, Father Garganel, S.J., Superior in the island of Martinique, asked for one or two Irish Fathers for that and the neighbouring islands, which were full of Irish; for, continues he, every year shiploads of men, boys, and girls, partly crimped, partly carried off by main force for purposes of slave trade, are conveyed by the English from Ireland. 

A very rare little book, published at Innspruck in 1659, by F. M. Morison, O.Min., states:

Besides those whom they slew (1651), after a treaty had been entered upon, and amnesty promised, they sent into perpetual exile 32,000 men and women from divers parts of the kingdom to different countries of the world.

An. 1657, I myself saw this iniquitous law carried out into iniquitous execution in the city of Limerick in Ireland, by Henry Ingoldsby, Governor of the same city. A certain noble gentleman of Thomond, named Daniel Connery, was accused of harbouring a priest in his house and convicted on his own confession (although the priest had safe conduct from the Governor himself), and declared guilty of death, And then, as he said, out of mercy, the sentence was changed, commuted, and he was despoiled of all his goods, and bound in prison, and finally condemned to perpetual exile. This gentleman had a wife and twelve children. His wife was of a very noble family of Thomond, and she fell sick, and died in extreme want even of necessaries. Three of the children, very beautiful and virtuous virgins, were sent off to the East (sic) Indies, to an island which they call Barbadoes, where, if they are still alive, they pass their days in miserable slavery. The rest of the children, who from their tender years could not work, have either perished from hunger, or live unhappily under the cruel yoke of heretics. 

If a Catholic cannot pay the fine for non-attendance at the Protestant church, an. 1658, he will certainly be sold as a slave, sent away to the East Indies (Indias Orientates), where he passes the remainder of his life in miserable slavery.

After the conquest of Jamaica in 1655, and the occupation of Barbadoes, the Governor of the latter island writes to Cromwell to assure him that the political prisoners shall not be released after the usual term has expired:

Such as hitherto have bin brought to this island from England, Scotland, and Ireland, have been landed on merchants accompts, who claimeing a propertie in the persons they bring as servants, for theire passage and disbursments on them, dispose of them heare, either for a tearme of yeares to serve, or for a summe of money, by which they free themselves from such servitude, either of which being performed, they have freedome to stay or departe hence, by the law and customes of the place. For the future, such as your highnes shall please to command theire stay heare, I shall to the utmoste possibility of meanes to be used, labour to keepe them with us in pursuance of your highnes' commands.

Henry Cromwell, Major-General of the Forces in Ireland, writes to Thurloe, September 11, 1655:

I received yours of the 4th instant, and give you many thankes for your relation of Jamaica. ... I have endeavoured to make what improvement I could in the short time allotted me toucheing the furnishinge you with a recruite of men, and a supply of younge Irish girles. . . . Concerninge the younge women, although we must use force in takeinge them up, yet it being so much for their owne goode, and likely to be of soe great advantage to the publique, it is not in the least doubted, that you may have such number of them as you shall thinke fitt to make use uppon this account.

Again, on September 18th, he writes:

I shall not need to repeate anythinge aboute the girles, not doubtinge but to answerr your expectationes to the full in that; and I think it might bee of like advantage to your affaires their, and ours heer, if you should thinke fitt to send 1,500 or 2,000 younge boys of 12 or 14 yeares of age to the place aforementioned. We could well spare them, and they would be of use to you; and who knows, but that it may be a meanes to make them English-men, I meane rather Christianes.

Lord Broghill to Secretary Thurloe, September 18th:

For women and maids, you must declare what you will give thera on ship-bord, and what ther conditions shall be, when ther. For my part, I beleeve you may get many more out of Ireland than heer, which I thought not impertinent to minde you of.

Thurloe writes to Henry Cromwell, September 25th:

I returne your lordship most humble thanks for the letter I received from you touching transporting of Irish girles to Jamaica.

Again he writes:

I did hope to have given your lordship an account by this post of the bussines of causinge younge wenches and youths in Ireland to be sent into the West-Indies; but I could not make thinges ready. The comittee of the counsell have voted 1,000 girles, and as many youths be taken up for that purpose, &c.

Thirty-three Royalist naval officers complain, on December 30, 1655:

That those who usurp the present power in England . . . most barbarously have sold and sent away many of those our friends (freeborn subjects to the crown of England) for slaves into some of the foreign plantations under the present power, &c 

This transporting of free subjects into slavery did not cease at the Restoration, as appears from the letter of Father Garganel. In fact, it was applied equally to all persons convicted. Thus, in 1666,

The resolutions about the Scotch rebels is to hang all ministers and officers; of the common sort, one in ten is to be executed, or forced to confession, and the rest sent to plantations.

Some observations on Barbadoes in 1667, note that there are

Not above 760 considerable proprietors, and 8,000 effective men, of which two-thirds are of no reputation and little courage, and a very great part Irish, derided by the negroes as white slaves. . . . Has inspected many plantations, and seen thirty or forty English, Scotch, and Irish at work in the parching sun, without shirt, shoe, or stocking; and negroes at their trades, in good condition; by which the whole may be endangered, for now there are many thousands of slaves that speak English, and if there are many leading men slaves in a plantation, they may be easily wrought upon to betray it, especially on the promise of freedom.

When the infamous Judge Jeffreys held his "Bloody Assize" after the suppression of Monmouth's rebellion, out of those who escaped the gallows, "above eight hundred were given to different persons to be transported for ten years to the West Indies." The historian says that "with respect to prisoners made in the field, it was argued [in the time of Elizabeth] that to them, as they might lawfully have been put to death on the spot, any fate short of death must be considered a favour: hence they were often transferred by gift or sale to others, who employed them as slaves, or by cruel treatment extorted from them or their relatives exorbitant ransoms. Afterwards, when colonies had been established in the West India Islands, these unhappy men were generally sold for a high price to the planters, to serve them as slaves during life, or for a certain term of years."

An authentic account by one of the victims has come down to us. Henry Pitman acted as surgeon to the forces of the Duke of Monmouth, and, though he had never been in arms, was taken prisoner after the defeat at Sedgemoor, in 1685, and tried by Judge Jeffreys, and ordered to be transported to the Caribee Islands.

And in order thereunto, my brother and I, with nearly a hundred more, were given to Jeremiah Nepho, and by him sold to George Penne, a needy Papist, that wanted money to pay for our transportation. . . . He at length prevailed upon with our relations to give him 60 Pounds, upon condition that we should be free when we came to Barbadoes; only owing some person, whom we should think fit to nominate, as a titular master. . . . And thus we may see the buying and selling of free men into slavery, was beginning again to be renewed among Christians.

When they got to Barbadoes, they found that a special Act of the Governor and Assembly of that island had been passed providing that no such arrangement as this should stand, but that every rebel sent out should serve his full time, and

Be obliged serve and obey the owner or purchaser of him or them, in their plantations within this island, in all such labour or service as they shall be commanded to do by their owners, masters, or mistresses, or their overseers, for the full time and term of ten years from the day of their landing, and disposed of fully to be completed and ended; any bargain, law, usage, or custom in this island to the contrary, in any wise, notwithstanding.

Pitman at first brought much gain to his master by his profession, but on his refusing to practise unless he got better food than the slaves,

My angry master could not content himself with the bare execution of his cane upon my head, arms, and back, although he played so long thereon, like a furious fencer, until he had split it in pieces; but he also confined me close prisoner in the stocks (which stood in an open place), exposed to the scorching heat of the sun, where I remained about twelve hours, until my mistress moved either with pity or shame, gave order for my release.

Pitman's brother died of his hardships, but he himself contrived to escape, and after many hair-breadth escapes, got back to England.

Henry and William Pitman both appear in the "Lists of convicted Rebels," as having been "sold and disposed of here in Barbadoes," with seventy others, by order of George Penne, Esq., 1685. The lists contain the names of 792 persons to be thus disposed of, but some of these died on the voyage.

There is no allusion in Bryan Edwards' History of the West Indies, to this reduction of free British subjects to slavery, but it is too well attested to be doubted, and therefore we have thought it right to investigate it in connection with the subject of Slavery and Serfdom.

The End

“Cromwell’s conquest of Ireland in the middle of the seventeenth century made slaves as well as subjects of the Irish people. Over a hundred thousand men, women and children were seized by the English troops and shipped to the West Indies, where they were sold into slavery...” (George Novack, “Slavery in Colonial America,” America’s Revolutionary Heritage, p. 142).

See also: When Blacks Owned Slaves, by Calvin Dill Wilson 1905 and A History of White Slavery by Charles Sumner 1853

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The Strange Adventures of the Word "Socialism" (Max Eastman)

The Strange Adventures of the Word "Socialism"

Editors note: This is an excerpt from Max Eastman's Reflections on the Failure of Socialism, originally published in 1955.

The word socialism was born a hundred and eighteen years ago in excited talk about the ideas of Robert Owen, a kindly English gentleman with shy eyes and a mighty nose and a great passion for apple dumplings. Owen came over to America in 1825 and bought a whole town and 30,000 acres of land out in Indiana on the banks of the Wabash. He issued a sweeping invitation to the “industrious and well disposed of all nations” to come out there and join him in the ownership of this property, and start living in cooperative peace and loving-kindness as nature had intended man to live. The place had been called “New Harmony” by a band of German monks who founded it, and that suited Owen’s scheme ideally.

Owen’s effort to attain beatitude in Indiana was repeated forty-one times in other parts of the long-suffering United States.


Owen was a shrewd and brilliant businessman, a sort of larger-visioned Henry Ford, and America welcomed him with her most royal gift of publicity. The Hall of Congress in Washington was turned over to him, and he explained socialism—and showed pictures of it—to an audience containing, among others, the President of the United States, a majority of both Houses of Congress, and most of the Justices of the Supreme Court.

“I am come to this country,” he announced, “to introduce an entire new state of society, to change it from an ignorant, selfish system to an enlightened, social system which shall gradually unite all interests into one, and remove all causes for contest between individuals.”

In France the word socialisme had a slightly different origin, but not very different. Owen’s effort to attain beatitude in Indiana was repeated forty-one times in other parts of the long-suffering United States by followers of the French apostle of harmony, Fourier.[1] As they all had like results, we may take Owen’s little ramshackle paradise on the banks of the Wabash as typical of these recklessly noble attempts, by combining love with rationality, to bring heaven down to earth. It perfectly represents the meaning of the word socialism at its birth.

And it held together only so long as Robert Owen stayed there and bossed it. Left to themselves, its thousand-odd members fell to chiseling and snitching and indulging in rather more slander, if you can imagine it, than is usual. After two years they “divvied” up in a cool mood and quit. Owen thought it was because “the habits of the individual system” prevailing in the rest of the world were too strong.
Notwithstanding this dismal and swift failure, Owen’s idea—that if business were run on cooperative principles, life in general would become friendly and harmonious—gradually became the dominant one among radical minds the world over. It gave birth through the years to a whole litter of differently shaded ideas: syndicalist, communist, guild-socialist, social-revolutionary, bolshevik, menshevik, Fabian socialist, Christian socialist, I.W.W., anarchist, etc. They differed as to how the new harmony was to be achieved, but they did not differ importantly about Robert Owen’s fundamental general idea. For over a hundred years, even by many who could not subscribe to it as a practical measure, that idea, baptized with the name of socialism, was assumed to represent the highest hopes of civilization.

Three really big things happened to the socialist idea in the course of these hundred-odd years. Around the middle of the past century, a cocksure, angry, and pedantic genius by the name of Karl Marx undertook to prove that, although it had failed so dismally in Indiana, it was inevitably coming true throughout the world. Marx was personally more impractical than Owen. He was as far away as you can get from a successful businessman. He floundered in dire financial straits most of his life long, and hardly ever managed to finish anything he undertook to do.

Marx was not troubled with loving-kindness, either—not at all the type to usher in millenniums on a retail plan by personal example. But Marx had a brain like a high-powered locomotive engine, and when he set out to prove a thing, there was nothing for ordinary facts or practical considerations to do but get out of the way. Marx made his proof so comprehensive and so cloudy, and wound up so much true science with the romantic metaphysics out of which it was concocted, that he actually convinced the best radical minds of three generations that Robert Owen’s dream was inevitably coming true.
From a vessel of brotherly emotion, Socialism turned into the battle-cry of a class fight.


It was not coming true because some more benign Englishmen were going to subsidize some more credulous Americans and demonstrate how noble it was. It was coming true, noble or not, because the whole of present-day society was going to split violently in half like a growing acorn. In irresistible revolutionary struggle the under and larger half, those without property, were going to grab the land and industries and impose this dream on the upper half by state force. No more postcard utopias on the banks of the Wabash! No more trust in the “well disposed”! Hard-headed, hard-fisted proletarians were going to put the thing across. The owners of the world, hopelessly “bourgeois,” didn’t want a New Harmony—that’s why Robert Owen failed. Well, they were going to get a New Harmony whether they wanted one or not. And they were going to get it—to translate the Marxian state of feeling very exactly—“in the neck.”

That was the first big thing that happened to the word socialism. From meaning a practical experiment it came to mean a metaphysical certainty, and from a vessel of brotherly emotion it turned into the battle-cry of a class fight. It became the “war aim” of the workers in their impending inevitable robber raid against the whole capitalist class.

The second big thing that happened—and life was seventy more years getting this ready—was that such a raid did actually occur. It occurred in Russia, the last place where anybody was looking for it, and it occurred largely because a great political genius gave his heart to Owen’s dream and his mind to Marx’s metaphysics.

Lenin was personally more like Robert Owen than like Karl Marx. He combined the same grandiose idealism with the same canny gift for getting things done. He had no special zeal for apple dumplings, but he had a similarly homelike love for cats. He had a hearty affection for people, too, that was notably lacking in Marx. He looked like an able executive who had lost his hair, though none of his vigor, sitting at a desk bossing a big industry. He was an able executive, and could have bossed a big industry. As head of the “Community of Equality” at New Harmony he would have made, while he lasted, a thriving success.

Lenin promised a New Harmony and the result is now well known: Officialdom gone mad.


But Lenin’s role in history was totally shaped and determined by the writings of Karl Marx. He believed fanatically—if that means absolutely and to the last detail—in the whole Marxian system. In his penciled comments on the margins of the Marxian texts he studied, there is not one word of dissent or disagreement. He learned Marx like a schoolboy, slavishly and with adoration. And yet in practice he was independent, alert, flexible, cunning, alive to new developments—possessed of a native intelligence superior, in my opinion, to that of his master.

In the name of socialism Lenin took charge of an actual revolution, led it to victory, and set going on the scale of the Russian empire the same romantic experiment that Robert Owen failed with on the banks of the Wabash ninety years before.

And the results were not better than Robert Owen’s but a million times worse. In his speeches before he seized power, Lenin promised the same wonderful things, and even more wonderful than Owen had promised at New Harmony:

“Democracy from below!” he shouted. “Democracy without an officialdom, without police, without a standing army . . . Immediate preparation for a state of things where all shall fulfill the functions of control and superintendence, so that none shall have the opportunity of becoming bureaucrats at all. . . . The state itself will wither away, by virtue of the simple fact that, freed from capitalist slavery, from the innumerable horrors, savagery, absurdities and infamies of capitalist exploitation, people will gradually become accustomed to the observation of the elementary rules of social life, known for centuries, repeated for thousands of years in all sermons. They will become accustomed to their observance without constraint, without subjection, without the special apparatus for compulsion which is called the State!”

That is the New Harmony Lenin promised, and the result is now well known: Officialdom gone mad, officialdom erected into a new and merciless exploiting class; the largest peace-time standing army in the world; the people universally disarmed; the functions of control and superintendence gripped in the fist of a ruling clique which, when needful, wages armed war on the people; the “slavery . . . horrors, savagery, absurdities and infamies of capitalist exploitation” so far outdone that they are talked of in secret as a lost paradise; bureaucrats everywhere, and behind the bureaucrats a gigantic army of high-paid state police; death for those who question or protest, death by execution without trial or by state-planned starvation in a slave camp.
Socialism survived long enough to show what was in it: tyranny, namely, and that new perfection of tyranny, the totalitarian state.


There are, strangely enough, specimens of the human brain whose owners still insist that this is a New Harmony in the making. Knaves, many of them, who have a job or prestige requiring that they say so; mental cowards, others, who, having put their faith in Lenin’s Marxism, lack the pluck to live without that faith. To honest men with courage to confront facts it is clear that Lenin’s experiment, like Robert Owen’s, failed.

It failed, however, in a different way. It did not drop naturally apart because the boss went home and let it run itself as it was supposed to. The boss, alas, stayed all too firmly on the job. It failed because it was prevented by military force from dropping naturally apart—by bayonets, machine guns, spies, chain-gangs, concentration camps, murder, massacre, and engineered starvation. It failed as a libertarian and humane hope because as a going concern it survived. It survived long enough to show what was in it: tyranny, namely, and that new perfection of tyranny, the totalitarian state. That new bloody thing wears, on all the maps of the world, the name of “socialist.”

Such is the main road traveled in a hundred and fifty years by the word socialism. It wandered down a branch road during the nineteenth century, and arrived on the emblems of another bloody police state—National Socialist Germany. It seems to know better than its creators and gentle-minded proprietors where it belongs. They will have trouble erasing it, anyway, from the histories of this whole epoch, the maps of the earth, the banners of the armies of fourteen nations. Might it not be better, instead of clinging to the word socialism, trying with mere adjectives to drag it back in the direction of its origins, to find out, if we can, what the basic mistake was of those who started it off on this strange and dreadful adventure?

---

[1] St. Simon is generally mentioned with Fourier and Owen as one of the fathers of utopian socialism, but his utopia was of so different a kind from theirs that its character was distorted somewhat by the very application of the name. See in this connection “Les Deux Socialismes” by Robert Louzon in La Révolution Prolétarienne for March and April 1948.

Max Forrester Eastman

Max Forrester Eastman (January 4, 1883 – March 25, 1969) was an American writer on literature, philosophy and society; a poet, and a prominent political activist. He supported socialism early in his career, however, Eastman changed his views, becoming highly critical of socialism and communism after his experiences during a nearly two-year stay in the Soviet Union in the 1920s, as well as later studies.

This article was originally published on FEE.org. Read the original article.