Chapter Five: The Crisis of Socialism [mp3] [YouTube] [74 minutes total]
Marx and waiting for Godot [mp3] [YouTube]
Three failed predictions [mp3] [YouTube]
Socialism needs an aristocracy: Lenin, Mao, and the lesson of the German Social Democrats [mp3] [YouTube]
Good news for socialism: depression and war [mp3] [YouTube]
Bad news: liberal capitalism rebounds [mp3] [YouTube]
Worse news: Khrushchev’s revelations and Hungary [mp3] [YouTube]
Responding to the crisis: change socialism’s ethical standard [mp3] [YouTube]
From need to equality [mp3] [YouTube]
From Wealth is good to Wealth is bad [mp3] [YouTube]
Responding to the crisis: change socialism’s epistemology [mp3] [YouTube]
Marcuse and the Frankfurt School: Marx plus Freud, or oppression plus repression [mp3] [YouTube]
The rise and fall of Left terrorism [mp3] [YouTube]
From the collapse of the New Left to postmodernism [mp3] [YouTube]
Previous:
Chapter One: What Postmodernism Is [mp3] [YouTube] [38 minutes]
Chapter Two: The Counter-Enlightenment Attack on Reason [mp3] [YouTube] [72 minutes]
Chapter Three: The Twentieth-Century Collapse of Reason [mp3] [YouTube] [50 minutes]
Chapter Four: The Climate of Collectivism [mp3] [YouTube] [102 minutes]
Robert Salvino (Economics, Coastal Carolina University) spoke at Rockford College on “Entrepreneurship and Public Policy.” In this follow-up interview, Salvino and I discuss entrepreneurial success traits, the institutional framework within which entrepreneurship best flourishes, the relative success of market-friendly versus government-chosen entrepreneurship policies (including examples such as Google, Apple, Solyndra, etc), the effect of employer-provided healthcare on self-employment rates, Salvino’s suggested general entrepreneurship-friendly public policies, and China’s success in lifting 600 million people out of poverty over the last generation.
Chapter Four: The Climate of Collectivism [mp3] [YouTube] [102 minutes]
From postmodern epistemology to postmodern politics [mp3] [YouTube]
The argument of the next three chapters [mp3] [YouTube]
Responding to socialism’s crisis of theory and evidence [mp3] [YouTube]
Back to Rousseau [mp3] [YouTube]
Rousseau’s Counter-Enlightenment [mp3] [YouTube]
Rousseau’s collectivism and statism [mp3] [YouTube]
Rousseau and the French Revolution [mp3] [YouTube]
Counter-Enlightenment politics: Right and Left collectivism [mp3] [YouTube]
Kant on collectivism and war [mp3] [YouTube]
Herder on multicultural relativism [mp3] [YouTube] Fichte on education as socialization [mp3] [YouTube]
Hegel on worshipping the state [mp3] [YouTube]
From Hegel to the twentieth century [mp3] [YouTube]
Right versus Left collectivism in the twentieth century [mp3] [YouTube]
The Rise of National Socialism: Who are the real socialists? [mp3] [YouTube]
Previous:
Chapter One: What Postmodernism Is [mp3] [YouTube] [38 minutes]
Chapter Two: The Counter-Enlightenment Attack on Reason [mp3] [YouTube] [72 minutes]
Chapter Three: The Twentieth-Century Collapse of Reason [mp3] [YouTube] [50 minutes]
Forthcoming:
Chapter Five: The Crisis of Socialism [mp3] [YouTube]
Chapter Six: Postmodern Strategy [mp3] [YouTube]
In response to that post, Tibor Machan pointed me to this passage from an 1872 speech Marx gave in Amsterdam:
“We are aware of the importance that must be accorded to the institutions, customs, and traditions of different countries; and we do not deny that there are countries like America, England (and, if I knew your institutions better, I would add Holland), where the workers can achieve their aims by peaceful means. However true that may be, we ought to recognize that, in most of the countries on the Continent, it is force that must be the lever of our revolutions.”[1]
Interesting exceptions. America, England, and Holland are, arguably, the countries in which capitalism had achieved the most development. Machan’s explanation is that Marx came to believe that in such advanced countries workers’ advancement could come about by gradualist methods: “Bit by bit, step by step, at municipal, county, state, and the federal levels of government, socialism can be instituted by democratic process.”[2]
(And adding up the bits, according to my math Marx was right and we’re over 50% there.[3])
This week in my Contemporary European Philosophy course, we are reading Friedrich Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom, published in 1944 at the height of World War 2.
“It is a common mistake to regard National Socialism as a mere revolt against reason, an irrational movement without intellectual background. If that were so, the movement would be much less dangerous than it is. But nothing could be further from the truth or more misleading. The doctrines of National Socialism are the culmination of a long revolution of thought, a process in which thinkers who have had great influence far beyond the confines of Germany have taken part. Whatever one may think of the premises from which they started, it cannot be denied that the men who produced the new doctrines were powerful writers who left the impress of their ideas on the whole of European thought. Their system was developed with ruthless consistency. Once one accepts the premises from which it starts, there is no escape from its logic. It is simply collectivism freed from all traces of an individualist tradition which might hamper its realization.” (p. 167)
Which thinkers and powerful writers? Hayek has named Hegel, Marx, and Nietzsche as the major 19th-century influencers. But isn’t it too much to expect politicians to read philosophers? Did Hitler actually read Hegel and Nietzsche? Perhaps. (Though we know that Dr. Goebbels was well read in them and a great admirer of Marx.)
So of great importance were the transitional thinkers of the generation from 1900 to 1933, the year the Nazis came to power. In Chapter 12, “The Socialist Roots of Naziism,” Hayek devotes a few paragraphs each to Werner Sombart, Johann Plenge, Friedrich Nauman, Paul Lensch, Moeller van den Bruck, and Oswald Spengler. All of them were steeped in combinations of Hegel, Marx, and Nietzsche, and all of them were socialists; but their value-added (so to speak) was as public intellectuals and as intellectual activists who applied the abstract theories to the particular German context.
National Socialism, then, as Hayek reads it, resulted from over a century of intellectual and development: Germany’s brightest minds developed the theory and laid the cultural groundwork for the Nazi political transformation.
How free are individuals in all 50 states? Political scientists Jason Sorens and Will Ruger have crunched the numbers in over 30 areas — civil liberties, travel freedom, drug enforcement, business regulation, tax policy, and so on — as well as computing overall rankings for each state.
And the winner is … North Dakota, followed by South Dakota, Tennessee, New Hampshire, and Oklahoma.
My home state, Illinois, now ranks 45th, falling two spots since 2009: “Illinois is one of the least free states to live in from the perspective of regulatory policy and personal freedom, but on fiscal policy it ranks in the middle of the pack.” Gack.
One of the themes in my Contemporary European Philosophy course is the vast gulf between the Continental and Anglo-American traditions over the desirability of war and peace. Relevant to that discussion are these quotations from Nietzsche on war:
Why war is necessary: “War essential. It is vain rhapsodizing and sentimentality to continue to expect much (even more, to expect a very great deal) from mankind, once it has learned not to wage war. For the time being, we know of no other means to imbue exhausted peoples, as strongly and surely as every great war does, with that raw energy of the battleground, that deep impersonal hatred, that murderous coldbloodedness with a good conscience, that communal, organized ardor in destroying the enemy, that proud indifference to great losses, to one’s own existence and to that of one’s friends, that muted, earthquakelike convulsion of the soul.” (HAH, 477)
For Nietzsche, this follows from the nature of life in general: “Here one must think profoundly to the very basis and resist all sentimental weakness: life itself is essentially appropriation, injury, conquest of the strange and weak, suppression, severity, obtrusion of peculiar forms, incorporation and at the least, putting it mildest, exploitation.” (BGE , 259)
A historical claim: “The beginnings of everything great on earth [are] soaked in blood thoroughly and for a long time.” (GM, II:6)
So for future great things, Nietzsche calls for “a conqueror- and master-race which, organized for war and with the force to organize unhesitatingly lays its terrible claws upon a populace perhaps tremendously superior in numbers but still formless and wandering.” (GM , II:17)
Metaphorically in Zarathustra: “All-too-many live, and all-too-long they hang on their branches. Would that a storm came to shake all this worm-eaten rot from the tree!” (Z, “Of Free Death”)
To prepare oneself: “One must learn from war … one must learn to sacrifice many and to take one’s cause seriously enough not to spare men.” (WP, 982)
And predictive of coming times: “I welcome all signs that a more virile, warlike age is about to begin, which will restore honor to courage above all. For this age shall prepare the way for one yet higher, and it shall gather the strength that this higher age will require one day—the age that will carry heroism into the search for knowledge and that will wage wars for the sake of ideas and their consequences.” (GS, 283)
There’s a calculator at the EFW site with this heading: “The average American’s lifetime share of the national debt is $482,367. What’s your share?”
One enters one’s age and clicks the calculator. I entered age zero to calculate for a newborn American. Result:
“Your lifetime share of the national debt is: $1,536,621.”
How’s that for Original Sin? You are born into this world and haven’t done anything yet — but you have inherited the misdeeds of earlier generations and must spend the rest of your life paying for them.
Marx and waiting for Godot [mp3] [YouTube]
“We are aware of the importance that must be accorded to the institutions, customs, and traditions of different countries; and we do not deny that there are countries like America, England (and, if I knew your institutions better, I would add Holland), where the workers can achieve their aims by peaceful means. However true that may be, we ought to recognize that, in most of the countries on the Continent, it is force that must be the lever of our revolutions.”[1] 
