Comments on: Say what you will about Stalin … he was no Babbitt.

By: Stephen Laniel’s Unspecified Bunker » To read

Stephen Laniel’s Unspecified Bunker » To read — Sat, 23 Feb 2008 19:48:43 +0000

[...] Burnham, James. Managerial Revolution, The: What Is Happening In The World. [...]

By: josh

josh — Fri, 22 Feb 2008 17:56:33 +0000

Oh dear. I feel I’m being a terrible pedant here … but once more unto the breach …
I didn’t say Laski repudiated democracy. I said he believed that CLASSICAL LIBERALISM (and thus, a specifically capitalist, individualist form of democracy) was ‘doomed’ by the forces of history (or, if you prefer, historical development). That is what John Holbo’s original question was about—the view that capitalism was doomed—so Laski seemed appropriate to bring up. (Laski did also seem to sway—in his usual fashion—between favouring more reformist and more revolutionary means to instituting a new system, but that’s another matter.)

By: A.M.

A.M. — Fri, 22 Feb 2008 16:04:29 +0000

Harold Laski never repudiated democracy. I repeat, advocating parliamentary and economic reform was NOT the same thing as repudiating democracy.

By: josh

josh — Fri, 22 Feb 2008 04:35:00 +0000

Thanks, Louis, for the warning about relying on Haslam; that’s interesting, and I’ll have to give the book another look.
Also—and sorry to belabor this point—I didn’t claim that Carr was a Stalinist during the ‘30s; as I said, he seemed to turn to championing Soviet Russia during WWII. In this, he was far from unique—once the USSR became Britain’s (and the U.S.’s) ally against Nazism, there was a widespread shift from criticism and condemnation to celebration of Soviet Russia. Carr was somewhat unusual in that he continued to defend the USSR against criticism after the Cold War had set in. I also do think that Carr was not only explaining the Soviet ‘critique’ of Western liberal democracy, but also endorsed it. And, in the debates of the time, this would have appeared not only as a criticism of Western societies, but a defense of Soviet policy.

By: Louis Godena

Louis Godena — Fri, 22 Feb 2008 01:49:27 +0000

Again, not to belabor this, but Carr was less concerned with “democracy” in Soviet Russia—and even less so in “defending” it—than he was in explaining the Soviet critique of the beast, particulary in his Impact lectures. And going back and reading his reviews in the TLS and elsewhere of the accounts by “fellow-travellers” during the purge trials is sufficient evidence that he was no Stalinist during the thirties. I think Carr envisioned a future with the best of both West and Russia incorporated in a “socialist” (planned) economy with some guarantees of individual liberties which would not interfere with the state’s abilities to provide a minimum standard of living for each citizen, especially in times of scarcity. Finally, I would be cautious in using Halsam the academic in assessing Carr the scholar. Opinion is nearly unanimous among Carr’s surviving associates and students that this “biography” is simply dreadful.

By: josh

josh — Thu, 21 Feb 2008 22:00:01 +0000

It would indeed be hyperbolic to characterise Carr as a ‘Nazi sympathizer’. Which is why I did not, in fact, do so. I merely noted that he was, at one point (and before the full extent of Nazi brutality became apparent) ‘well-disposed’ to Nazi and Fascist policies. This was not a matter of just thinking that Germany had gotten a ‘raw deal’ at Versailles; in addition(as documented in the highly sympathetic biography of Carr by his sometime student Jonathan Haslam) Carr believed that Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy were, through their embrace of collectivism. He did, in fact, write some pretty complimentary stuff about Nazi Germany in its early years—though he did also hedge these statements with (in retrospect, insufficient) qualifications.
As for Carr on the Soviet Union, I suspect that we simply disagree what an ‘objective’ view of the Russian Revolution and subsequent Leninist and Stalinist policy were. But Carr certainly did act as an advocate of the Soviet Union, defending it as democratic during some of the worst years of Stalinist repression, and trying to suppress more critical (perhaps too critical, though I tend to think not) studies of Soviet policy such as Leonard Schapiro’s (again, there is much detail in Haslam’s book).
I may, indeed, have been hyperbolic in using the term ‘doomed’ to describe Carr’s estimation of liberal democracy; I forget if he uses the word (I suspect that I was confusing passages from The New Society with some of Harold Laski’s writings—another figure who thought classical liberalism was, yes, doomed). But Carr does explicitly portray liberal democracy as socially out-dated, as resting on assumptions about human nature and society that were no longer sustainable (and in some cases never had been). The form of democracy that he believed was appropriate for modern society was mass democracy—or as Carr called it in earlier books (The Soviet Impact on the Western World and Democracy in International Affairs, from 1945 and 1946), ‘totalitarian democracy’ (a term which, so far as I can tell, Carr introduced into English—it appeared seemingly simultaneously in French). We can perhaps quibble over terminology, and debate the merits of this view; but it seems to me to be what John Holbo was initially talking about.
(Incidentally, and tying this back more closely to the initial post, Berlin explicitly associated Carr and Burnham as part of the same trend—a ‘realist’ celebration of brute strength—in a 1951 letter to George Kennan.)

By: Louis Godena

Louis Godena — Thu, 21 Feb 2008 18:40:30 +0000

Just a brief dissent: E H Carr never believed that “liberal democracy” was “doomed.” Only that, being a product of ephemeral economic dispensations, it was bound to evolve beyond its laissez-faire beginnings into a highly structured and highly-planned entity of states. This has pretty much happened, though not via the establishment of social-welfare schemes and such that Carr clearly favored. Rather, the change has been precipitated by military necessity, a prospect he fearfully hinted at in The New Society(1950). Too, it is hyperbolic to characterize Carr as a “Nazi sympathizer”; he, like many others, thought that Germany had gotten a raw deal at Versailles and that Hitler was a more or less run-of-the-mill response to the country’s continuing crisis. Nor was he a “committed” partisan of the Soviet Union; he w just viewed things more objectively than most establishment historians during the course of the Cold War.

By: josh

josh — Thu, 21 Feb 2008 04:18:14 +0000

Just a footnote to Jacob Levy’s last: as readers of the Berlin essay he mentions—‘Historical Inevitability’—may remember, the piece is directed partly against Berlin’s friend and polemical opponent E.H. Carr, who offers another data-point reflecting the widespread belief that liberal democracy was doomed—a point he made in a number of books and articles, before, during, and after WWII (though he did switch from being well-disposed toward Nazism/Fascism in the 1930s, to being a committed advocate for the Soviet Union during and after the War).
Also: Karl Mannheim’s writings from the late ‘30s and early ‘40s make a larger point about the disintegration and ‘sickness’ of society; liberal democracy’s doom is portrayed as but one part of this more general malaise. Indeed, I think one can locate this whole line of thought within the more general ‘crisis of the West’-type-thinking that goes back to the ‘20s.

By: Dave

Dave — Wed, 20 Feb 2008 20:38:38 +0000

That the USA continued to stare down the barrel of the Depression through the 30s, while FDR tried things his opponents repeatedly denounced as crypto-communist violations of constitutional freedoms, had nothing to do with these intellectual tergiversations, I take it?

Strikes me that something like liberal democracy was damn lucky to escape the beartrap of that decade and the next, on the global scene, never mind going “ooh look, what funny pessimists…”

By: Ben Alpers

Ben Alpers — Wed, 20 Feb 2008 14:19:59 +0000

In the 1930s, Robert Heinlein was actually one of the fairly small number of US followers of the Social Credit movement, which was most successful in Canada and New Zealand. His first novel, For Us, the Living (written in the late '30s) is an attempt to imagine a society organized by Socred principles.

By: Jacob T. Levy

Jacob T. Levy — Wed, 20 Feb 2008 12:30:24 +0000

A.M.:
“2. Milosz wrote with the benefit of hindsight. Don’t take his teleological tendencies too seriously.
3. Benda is not without his flaws. I’d prefer my intellectuals to be politically engaged rather than detached.”

Since I’m the one who mentioned both, I suppose this must be aimed at me, but I certainly wasn’t listing either people I found flawless or people I considered to be perfectly accurate social scientists. Just trying to offer confirmatory citations for the sense that plenty of people in the 20s-50s thought that capitalism and liberal democracy were doomed by the forces of history.

One more thing that shouldn’t go unmentioned on a blog called Crooked Timber. Berlin, “Historical Inevitability,” 1954—which, like Popper’s stuff about historicism, is an attempt just to beat back the sense (whether Hegelian via Kojeve or Marxist) that things are historically doomed or destined for triumph. He didn’t believe it—but he thought that much of his audience did.

By: Tracy W

Tracy W — Wed, 20 Feb 2008 11:54:13 +0000

Beyond This Horizon is a terrifying sympathetic portrayal of libertarianism.

I don’t think of Beyond This Horizon as particularly libertarian. There is a computer, or set of computers, that manages the economy, there appears to be some sort of universal basic income, including special payments to people who are control naturals (not sure if that was the exact phrase, but people who are not genetically-engineered), the population is being purposefully managed for genetic fitness – eg there is technology that could avoid women having to go through pregnancy but it’s not used due to fears that humanity could become dependent on it and then go extinct if something goes wrong and the technology is not available in the future, and there is substantial government spending on issues of no economic value.

I found it an interesting view of a post-scarcity economy that avoided the cliche of the whole society being built on some deep dark secret (see Star Trek whenever they find a utopian planet). But nothing like as libertarian a society as The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress.

By: HansG

HansG — Wed, 20 Feb 2008 11:25:09 +0000

The historian John Lukacs in various books makes an interesting point about the convergence of ideologies mid-century, where communism becomes nationalist, while anti-communism (in its fascist and democratic variants) becomes more socialist. And in the middle of it all, of course, is the Weberian manager, who is a sort of response to Nietzschen nihilism, and reconciles fragmented means to ambitious ends. So: yes, Burnham speaks to a much broader intellectual current.

By: Alex

Alex — Wed, 20 Feb 2008 09:51:39 +0000

We’re basically talking about J.K. Galbraith’s technostructure here; the management, and specifically the engineering bureaucracy, of big organisations is in charge, not the largely theoretical owners (or the largely irrelevant CEO). So much capital comes from retained profit or government that the banks and shareholders’ influence is negligible.

Which sounds fair enough up until the 1980s, when we saw a ferocious reassertion of shareholder power, C-level authority, and supposed entrepreneurship.

By: MFB

MFB — Wed, 20 Feb 2008 08:47:09 +0000

Yes. The frightening thing about Burnham was that he knew what he was talking about. He offers the notion that people like him will take over and rule forever, whether under the guise of fascism or socialism or American imperialism (by the late 40s he was arguing for nuking every enemy and seizing the world by force).

Heinlein, by the way, has an interesting satire on the Technocracy (very similar to Burnham, and something along the lines of the “end of ideology” line) in his short story “The Roads Must Roll”. Oh, and Beyond This Horizon is a terrifying sympathetic portrayal of libertarianism.