NRPLUS MEMBER ARTICLE {C} an he get away with it?
This is the question to ask about Sohrab Ahmari’s book Tyranny, Inc. The tyranny Ahmari describes is a “private tyranny.” Not just now, but for centuries, Ahmari claims, Americans have failed to recognize that “unchallenged market power can impair our rights and liberties.” The result, according to Ahmari, is a “system that allows the asset-owning few to subject the asset-less many to pervasive coercion that, unlike government actions, can’t be challenged in court or at the ballot box.”
To make this case, Ahmari deploys pure theory. The underlying problem is our excessive faith in the individual. Our worship of the individual has for too long blinded us to the plight of the family and the average worker. That faith clashes outright with Christianity, forcing, as Ahmari puts it, even “devotees of the Latin Mass” — his example — to bend their principles to the “economic imperatives” of making a profit. American workers must recognize their chains and collectively “drag our politicians and corporate leaders into a new consensus.” Only pressure from a crowd can move Washington to do the long-overdue work to constrain private-equity wolves and big corporations, such as placing heavy levies on carried interest, placing details of private-equity transactions under auditors’ desk lamps, or passing aggressive labor laws that enable unions to punch back in perpetuity.
It’s an interesting vision. But where is the reality? There is scant evidence that the majority of Americans of the 19th or 20th century perceived conflict between markets or individualists on the one hand and the family on the other. Even in the darkest days of the Great Depression, workers alarmed militants with their reluctance to enlist in class battles: “American Labor is conservative,” wrote the Dutch journalist Odette Keun on a visit to the Tennessee Valley Authority, “it is one of the most flabbergasting discoveries I have made.” The New Dealers did pass a law with the power to foster class war, the 1935 National Labor Relations Act. The act made not only collective bargaining but also the closed shop the rule in industrial centers.
Ahmari deplores the fact that, a decade later, lawmakers undid much of that power via a second labor law, the Taft-Hartley Act. In titling his chapter on the New Deal “There Was an Alternative,” Ahmari suggests that the United States squandered the opportunity the Wagner Act represented by altering it. Yet he fails to cover the factual reasons Congress shifted: The Wagner Act placed such pressure on employers that they failed to hire or rehire, fostering joblessness in the 15 percent range in the later 1930s. As Dominic Pino has pointed out in these pages, the past seven decades suggest that Ahmari’s primary recommendation, powerhouse unionism, suppresses that thing “wage laborers” want more than a higher wage or reduction of “work-life tensions,” to mention several evils Ahmari catalogues: a job.
Yet Ahmari may get away with it. For theory indeed rules at the educational institutions that produce our leaders. The moment that commenced in our modern lives was not the moment that colleges introduced, say, gender studies. The trouble started decades further back, as National Review‘s own founder, William F. Buckley, pointed out just after he finished college with his first book in 1951, God and Man at Yale.
God and Man is known to most as a plea for recognizing the importance of religious faith in the formation of undergraduates, not just at Yale, but elsewhere. “For God, for Country, and for Yale — in that order” as Buckley says in his dedication. But along the way, Buckley also chronicled the rise of the discipline that, despite its name, is principally theory: social science.
In the 1800s, Yale and similar institutions exposed their undergraduates to the traditional reality of commerce, as they called it. Commerce, they observed, was all about the individual and individual contracts. The individual included his family, his property, and his faith. The danger lay in claims made about or for imaginary collectives. Yale’s most famous professor at the turn of the century, William Graham Sumner, provided his own formula, a pre-buttal as neat as any, to Ahmari’s collectivist algebra. “A” and “B,” men at the top, might want to help “X,” the men at the bottom. That was all right as long as the efforts of “A” and “B” remained voluntary. A problem emerged however when “A” and “B” coerced “C,” a third party in the shadows, into funding their perhaps worthy, but perhaps dubious, endeavor to help “X.” Sumner called “C,” the figure submerged by the collective, “the man who prays, the man who pays, the man who is not thought of.”
By the 1920s, however, that emphasis on the individual was weakening. An aggregator who gained popularity was Yale’s Irving Fisher, who favored indices — today Fisher would be raking millions as leader of a Big Data shop. Fisher was also one of the founders of the school of monetarism, itself about aggregates. War is all about aggregates — planning battles, not killing individuals. In spring 1941, a point when U.S. entry in World War II was strengthening, the college introduced a new course, “War Economics.” Both during and after the war the college hired up, giving posts to disciples of the Lord Aggregate himself, John Maynard Keynes. The term “disciple” fits because, as Buckley reports, when the college of Jonathan Edwards ceased to recognize the role of religion it created a kind of moral vacuum. That vacuum pulled in a replacement for religion: social science. And social science, especially economics as taught at Yale, ignored the “Christian individual” (Buckley’s term). Social science promoted “a slow but relentless transfer of power from the individual to the state.”
The thoroughness of this shift shocked the undergraduate Buckley. Students arriving in New Haven post-war learned economics from a spate of new books: Economic Analysis and Public Policy by Mary Jean Bowman and George Leland Bach, The Elements of Economics by Lorie Tarshis, Income and Employment by Theodore Morgan, and, soon enough Economics: An Introductory Analysis by Paul Samuelson. As Buckley noticed, these texts did treat commerce and the individual but mainly by way of eulogy for a past record: “capitalist, or dominantly free enterprise economics have succeeded,” wrote Morgan. Samuelson suggested that the era of the individual had passed and supplied as evidence the observation that “the businessman has never returned to his previous position of prestige.” Bowman and Bach rated free-market individualism “impractical of application.” Americans wanted “cradle to grave” security supplied by Washington, Samuelson wrote. Inequalities in Russia, noted Bowman and Bach, “need not be as great as the inequalities currently existing in the United States.” And so on. Benjamin Anderson, the most thoughtful scholar of the Great Depression, and Ludwig von Mises, the guru of bureaucratic damage, went ignored at Yale. Likewise bypassed was Friedrich von Hayek, whose Road to Serfdom was proving a runaway best seller on Main Street and Wall Street.
The teachers did their own damage. By and large, these disciples reinforced the throne of Lord Aggregate. They emphasized that precinct of social science that is more purely about collectives and aggregates, macroeconomics. The most quoted Yale economist in Buckley’s years was Charles Lindblom, through whose “Comparative Economic Systems” 200 young future multipliers passed each year.
Lindblom’s courses weren’t bad, the young Buckley allowed, if you could stomach the collectivism. Lindblom told undergraduates that his job was to “disabuse as many of you as possible of 15th Century notions about capitalism.” To this end, Lindblom treated higher taxation in the same fashion as Oliver Wendell Holmes, who ruled that taxes were “the price we pay for civilization.” Lindblom was also remarkably cavalier about property, informing a crowd at Yale’s Political Union in 1949 that America needed more and better bureaucracy. To Lindblom, it seemed like a fine idea “to socialize industry here and there.” Collective bargaining couldn’t be fair, Lindblom taught, unless factories were forbidden from operation during strike. Such notions were ironed in by Lindblom and others for decades. Commenting in 1961 on the share of individualists and free-marketeers teaching at Yale, the remaining free-marketeer at Yale, O. Glenn Saxon, noted that beside himself, “they are virtually gone.” And Saxon passed away the following year.
But Yale, for all its self-importance, was a mere data point in a trend taking hold in most classrooms across the nation. One of the most useful parts of Buckley’s God and Man is its Appendix G, in which Buckley listed the hundreds of colleges that, in the later 1940s, used the same textbooks that Yale did: Samuelson was already taught at hundreds of schools, ranging from Allegheny College to the Universities of Toronto and Wyoming. Tarshis showed up in syllabi from American University to Hunter College and Williams.
In the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s, a partial exception was provided by the still-young University of Chicago and New York University, the latter enjoying the advantage of being somewhat tethered to reality by virtue of being a night school. These upstarts hired a more diverse pool of teachers. The resulting quality earned the Ivies a reputation as an intellectual backwater. “If ‘the best’ teachers go to the so-called Ivy League why aren’t men like Ludwig Mises of New York University, Friedrich Hayek of the University of Chicago, Fritz Machlup of Johns Hopkins University, and David McCord Wright of the University of Virginia teaching economics there?,” asked Lawrence Fertig of New York University in 1951.
Perhaps because in that era many undergrads arrived at college only after military service had sobered them, there was also some protest in New Haven or by alumni against the most radical of the new textbooks. Some textbooks (Tarshis’s) were set aside or altered in new editions. A small rebellion emerged: the Intercollegiate Society of Individualists was created to foster broader instruction at universities. Buckley noted these advances in a 1977 edition of God and Man: “The term individualism was once used as the antonym of ‘collectivism.’ Today the preference is for more individuated terms.” In the Reagan years, it appeared that what happened at colleges did not matter — colleges were backwaters. For several decades, our economy was sufficiently individualist to produce vast increases in the standard of living. The poverty of communism, whose extent was revealed only at its collapse, provided more helpful data.
Alas for Buckley and the rest of us, that rebellion wasn’t powerful enough to restore the academy. And that academy is itself more powerful than we imagined. Today, the rebellion’s arguments and evidence lie just far back enough to allow Ahmari-style collectivist chatter to dominate college common rooms, the intellectual salon, and Congress. Modern cronyism is a serious problem, but one which collectivism can only strengthen. Those who advocate collectivism are betting that most young Americans won’t choose to look at the record. Yet, as Buckley noted seven decades ago, “collectivism” sounds intriguing only “if you are willing to forget that collectivism is as old as tyranny.”