Penton (1904-1951) is forgotten because he died in mid-career. He almost certainly would have been the standout editor and commentator through the 1950s and the 1960s, flying the flag for classical liberalism and especially free speech. Fortunately there is an excellent biography by Patrick Buckridge and a short version on line.

He described himself as a classical liberal and he was a tireless critic of censorship. For him, freedom was all-important and freedom of speech was the first line of defence of freedom.

He was born in Brisbane and moved to Sydney to pursue a career as a journalist, and novelist.

For two years during the 1930s he wrote a weekly column in The Daily Telegraph called The Sydney Spy with a distinctive blend of tones and topics “urbane, mocking and iconoclastic, with an extraordinary range of cultural reference —which made him something of a cult figure in Sydney. His reputation was enhanced by the critical success of Landtakers, the story of Derek Cabell, an English immigrant to the Moreton Bay settlement in the 1840s”

“The Daily Telegraph of the mid-1940s, under his direction, was a triumph of editorial co-ordination and flair. His style was irreverent, progressive and individualist, critical of ‘red tape’ and censorship, and seriously committed to improving public awareness and promoting a modern and civilized urban lifestyle.”

During the war he wrote a polemic on free speech Think -or be Damned and later Advance Australia – Where? urging people to prepare for the postwar challenge of living in Asia in a new world order without British protection.

“Penton’s private life was always controversial: his bohemian appearance and behaviour, his compulsive pursuit of women, and his refusal to defer to convention in the conduct of long-term, extra-marital liaisons made him some enemies. He was a noted bon viveur and an enthusiastic sailor. He was one of Australia’s great newspaper editors, an important novelist, a passionate but critical Australian nationalist, and a courageous liberal campaigner for what he called ‘a civilized mode of social living together’.”

In short, a paradigm case, an exemplar of the hippie conservative!

In response to some critical comment, extramarital adventurism and refraining from washing are not core characteristics of hippie or bohemian conservatism and those who choose to indulge in monogomy and bathing don’t need to feel that they are letting the side down.

As the spiritual and intellectual debacle of socialism becomes increasingly obvious to everyone outside the ranks of Western intellectuals, there are signs of increasing tension between various non-socialist schools of thought. For example the IPA Review during 1988 reported a survey of six liberal or conservative columnists on a wide range of issues which yielded unanimous agreement on only three items.

If these tensions reflect fundamental differences, then the groupings of the ‘non-left’ may fragment into warring factions. No doubt some differences arise from misunderstandings which can be resolved, and some simply reflect the different priorities and interests of individuals. Significant differences are likely to arise in two areas: a) the use of state power to enforce moral principles and b) the domain of economic policy. In each case the nub of the issue is the extent of state intervention that is appropriate.

Greg Sheridan provided a useful point of departure in considering these issues when he described three strands of right-wing thought and floated the idea of a merger. In The Weekend Australian (July 12, 1986), he pondered the prospect of some masterly theorist effecting a ‘dazzling synthesis’ of market liberalism, cultural conservatism and the thoughts of BA Santamaria.

He associated market liberalism with the free-enterprise think tanks, such as the Centre of Independent Studies. The conservatives tend to be involved with Quadrant, the Association for Cultural Freedom and perhaps the Institute for Public Affairs. Santamaria does not fit comfortably with either of those groups though he has points of contact with both. He operates in a tradition of Roman Catholic thought which includes Hilaire Belloc and is equally suspicious of capitalism and communism. (This was first written in 1986, Santamaria is no longer a living presence in this debate).

The synthesis that Sheridan wants to see would combine the economic rigour of the market liberals, with religious and spiritual inspiration, both tempered by the prudence of the conservative.

In Sheridan’s opinion, the economic rationality of the market liberals is too narrow in its focus and it lacks moral, cultural and spiritual depth, a view which is often expressed in the comment that economists know the price of everything and the value of nothing. Against this it can be argued that the classical liberal tradition, epitomised by F A Hayek and Karl Popper is not vulnerable to the charge of narrowness. Indeed, much of the work for the dazzling synthesis has been done by Hayek, senior member of the Austrian school of liberal economists.

Market liberalism aims to protect the private domain of the individual and small groups - including the family - Burke’s ‘little platoons’. This domain is at risk from the hostile activities of individuals and groups who are liable to use brute force or other political means of coercion if they are not kept under control by institutional constraints, a strong liberal tradition and the Rule of Law. In the protected private domain all manner of spiritual and cultural traditions and practices can be nurtured but the barbarism of unchecked power is likely to sweep these things away or else corrupt them by recruiting them to its own purposes, as when Christianity became the official religion of Rome.

Some economic rationalists may need to be reminded that we do not live by bread and technology alone. Our lives gain meaning and purpose from the myths and traditions which constitute our non-material heritage. At a lower but no less important level our daily transactions are dignified and lubricated by civility and good manners. Both the higher and lower orders of this fragile structure of civilisation are perpetuated by cultural practices and by institutions such as the family and the universities. These, like the private domain itself, are under threat from various doctrines and schools of thought that are also part of our intellectual heritage. If we lose the capacity to subject our heritage to imaginative criticism we run the risk that the positive tendencies will be driven out by the negatives. Some would say that this process is well advanced.

Economic liberals may sometimes appear to have little interest in these spiritual and cultural matters but this is not entirely true and the impression arises from three reasons. First, it is not possible to talk usefully about every social problem at once and economists tend to talk most about the things they know best. Second, they do not speak with one voice on such matters. Third, they do not see these things as part of the agenda of state policy. Here a basic principle is at stake because they do not aim to impose religious or cultural values, instead they wish to sustain ‘a type of order in which, even on issues which to one are fundamental, others are allowed to pursue different ends’, as Hayek put it.

Turning to economic policy we find much conservative apprehension about the push for deregulation and privatisation. Socialists and many conservatives share a distrust of capitalism due to their failure to appreciate the function of markets and the nature of competition in the marketplace. Competition is commonly regarded as a Darwinian struggle, a war of ‘all against all’, ‘dog eat dog’ with the large and the strong surviving to exploit the weak.

This is misleading because it is not appropriate to describe economic competition in military terms, or to speak of the conquest of a market. It is especially misleading to think that sellers are in conflict with buyers because both parties to a voluntary transaction can be well pleased with the deal. As for competition leading to monopolies (and then to exploitation), the survival of a firm in an open market depends on keeping the customers happy which is the very opposite of exploitation. Monopolies typically arise as a result of state intervention whether by nationalisation or by granting special trading rights. Under these conditions a great deal of activity shifts from pleasing buyers to maintaining or extending the political patronage that led to monopoly status.

It is illuminating to examine how progressives and radicals lost touch with the classical liberal principles of free trade and human rights. Early in the nineteenth century the two major opposed forces in politics were the liberals and the conservatives (Whigs and Tories). However the rise of socialism and the labour movement upset the balance of power and made the battle of ideas much more complex. By the start of the twentieth century the ideas of classical liberalism were broken up and distributed among various rival groups. Part of the classical heritage that is associated with Edmund Burke, with concern about revolutionary excesses and the tyranny of the majority, was appropriated by backward looking conservatives. The humanitarian elements were carried forward by Fabians and Liberals who could see no way to achieve progress without increased State control and regulation. Free trade was an early victim of the new consensus because not even the conservatives wanted to save it. The Great Depression resulted, followed by the disasters of war. The depth of the liberal decline was recorded by Orwell’s 1945 observation that the British intellectuals of all political shades were more totalitarian than the mass of the people.

With the growing power of the labour movement over the last century, liberals of the classical (non-socialist) variety have been forced into ad hoc alliances with conservates to resist the socialist thrust of the Left. Consequently market liberalism has become identified as a reactionary movement, aided by the fact that socialism has exerted a hypnotic charm over the majority of intellectuals for two centuries. Hence the importance of Hayek’s piece ‘Why I am not a conservative’ as a corrective. Due to the compromises required for the liberal/conservative alliance in practical politics, the spirit of classical liberalism has languished to the point of death because no party or group sustained it in a pure form. This was the case with the Liberal Party in Australia which, until the 1980s pursued protectionism in trade and tended to flirt with anti-intellectual conservatism on cultural and social issues.

The Rule of Law is a principle that conservatives might be expected to hold dear. But Hayek drew attention to ‘the characteristic complacency of the conservative toward the action of established authority and his prime concern that this authority be not weakened rather than that its power be kept within bounds. This is difficult to reconcile with the preservation of liberty’. Some conservatives tend to share with socialists a willingness to recruit the power of the state to coerce others where the liberal would allow freedom of choice. Conscription for military service (by the Liberal Coalition Government in Australia) was a case in point and retrospective legislation on tax avoidance was a notable example of the Rule of Law being flouted by another ‘Liberal’ government.

Returning to the matter of pooling resources or merging the intellectual traditions of the non-left, the market liberals may wonder whether the conservatives are prepared to lift their understanding of economics and join the push for open markets, especially in labour. Economic rationalists must strongly contest the right of the state to interfere in the marketplace and thus to threaten the fabric of a democratic and capitalist system which has the potential to let everyone pursue their own interests and improve their lot free from material deprivation, intellectual tutelage and moral or physical coercion.

Liberals have usually been prepared to learn from anyone, including their opponents and over the years they have shed many errors that sustained previous generations, such as belief in the inevitability of progress. With some of the economic battles won, it is important for the ‘dries’ to become more active in the debate on values and the broader cultural agenda.

Some of the topics to pursue:

The threat to free speech posed by ‘political correctness’.

The pros and cons of public funding for the arts.

The decline of fair play and civility in public debate.

Plagiarism and academic fraud.

Political bias in the contents of school texts in history and social studies.

Intellectual property rights.

Obscurantist fads and fashions. POMO and deconstruction.

The loss of valuable writers who ‘go out of fashion’ such as Jacques Barzun.

IMMEDIATE ACTIVITIES

Compile a bibliography of materials.

Build a list of interested people who may be involved as the program goes forward.

In-house discussions to refine our grasp of particular issues.

Articles and reviews in Policy.

Occasional papers.

Seminars & workshops in-house.

Review of HSC history texts.

TOPICAL ISSUES [written in 1992]

The denigration of Pauline Hanson.

Playing the racism card.

Quadrant magazine and the Cold War.

Who won the war in Vietnam?

The sinister figure of the “New Right“.

Why are we sorry?

Noel Pearson on the curse of welfare for Aborigines.

EDUCATION

Academic Fads and Fashions.

The Killing of History

Postmodernism, Postcolonialism.

The Politics of the Teachers Federation.

The Feminisation of Education.

How the System fails Boys.

THE ARTS

An alternative to public funding.

The Museum of Contemporary Art.

What happened to drawing?

This paper was written in 2008, before the Labour Party surprisingly lost power in Western Australia followed by the same result in Victoria in 2010. Since that time the ALP lost office in NSW and Queensland, followed by the national defeat in 2013.

If conscription or some other factors shifted the centre of gravity of Australian politics to the point where the ALP ruled practically from coast to coast for much of the time from 1983 to 2010, what accounts for the situation where the party could be thrown out of office everywhere with the exception of Tasmania and maybe the Northern Territory? There has certainly not been a surge of classical liberalism in the electorate at large! This requires a substantial discussion which is not attempted here. Contributing factors would appear to be the major focus of ALP activists on winning elections rather than developing good policies, and, associated with that, the politicization of the public service to the detriment of good decision-making and planning in the middle and upper management. More work is required to explore this situation. It appears that the Coalition parties are not doing that work and it remains to be seen how much better they can do when they achieve office, especially at the State level.

2008. The recent launch of The Howard Years has prompted comparisons with Bob Menzies and his long term of office. Some people have suggested that Menzies had it easier than Howard due to the more conservative tone of the times. Menzies did not have to go to the electorate in the aftermath of the “swinging sixties.”

The point of this article is that he did not have to face the backlash from one of his own policies – the conscription of young people during the Vietnam War.

The legislation was introduced during the Indonesia - Malaysian Confrontation (1963-1966) but it was not used on that occasion. This paper argues that the Menzies Government left the Coalition an electoral poison pill when it resolved to send conscripts to the Vietnam war, unlike the WW2 when conscripts were kept close to home.

I assert that conscription, more than the war itself, created a wave of protest and discontent which energised supporters of the ALP (and radical leftwing groups) and more significantly, diverted many voters and political activists from the conservative side of politics into long-term support for the ALP or other non-conservative parties.

Even allowing for the other social changes that were happening at the time, it is likely that the conscription issue played a major role in tipping the electoral fortunes towards the ALP a couple of decades later.

The tipping effect took some time to fully emerge as more cohorts of voters came of age in the new climate created by the conscription issue and the new climate of public opinion that was increasingly dominated by members of the educated middle class who had moved to the left during the conscription debate.

In The End of Certainty (1992, 1994), Paul Kelly suggested that the “Vietnam quagmire” lost the conservatives a whole generation of politically-active young Australians.

“This was the generation which underwrote Labor’s governance in the 1980s. Labor succeeded in the 1980s because it had better leaders, organizers and strategists. These resources grew from seedlings nourished for over twenty years.”

Until the recent and unexpected ascent of the Liberals in Western Australia the ALP ruled in Canberra and in all the states and territories. The situation in mid-1965 was very different. Menzies had been the PM for as long as many people could remember and Liberals or allies under various names held power from coast to coast with the relatively minor exceptions of Tasmania and South Australia.

Apparently something very significant happened to the relative status of the major parties in the course of a generation. With the wisdom of hindsight, a major cause of that fundamental shift in the balance of power can be traced to a blunder by the Menzies Government.

Conscription

The policy was announced in late 1964 during the confrontation between Malaya and Indonesia (1962-1966) and it commenced in 1965 to supplement voluntary recruitment to build up an adequate fighting force in case of emergencies. The Vietnam war then became the major field of action. Ballots recruited young men who turned 20 during the year and this aggravated many people because the conscripts had not reached the voting age of 21 at the time. Another grievance was the highly restrictive law on conscientious objection which demanded both religious grounds for objection and an objection to all wars. Unbelievers were excluded, as were young men who were not pacifists but wanted to exercise the right to make a decision about just and unjust wars.

Paul Kelly referred to the “Vietnam quagmire” but he did not pinpoint conscription as a critical or even a particularly significant issue. This is most likely because the issue of the war and conscription were mostly fused into one without taking account of a nuanced position that addresses the two issues separately. The Government would have been more credible if it pursued the war without conscription. Reasonable arguments could be advanced to support the defence of the people in South Vietnam from a communist takeover but it was impossible for anyone with a sense of moral and intellectual consistency to accept the use of conscription in a war that was supposed to be fought in defence of freedom.

Arguments

There are two main lines of argument to support my case on the pivotal importance of the conscription issue. The first is to make a comparison with the Korean war (1950-1953). The second is to note the kind of protestors who mobilised to resist conscription and the way that their political orientation and/or their level of involvement was permanently changed. In addition there are two secondary lines of argument. One is to respond to the obvious objection that everything was up in the air in the heady times of the swinging sixties and that alone would have created serious problems for political conservatives. The other addresses the fact that there was a worldwide surge of radicalism, notably involving Britain, France and Germany which were not involved in Vietnam, so it could be argued that this movement would have exerted influence in Australia regardless of conscription and the war.

Korea

I am not aware of any significant public unrest over the Korean War, although no doubt Communists and their fellow travellers would have objected. Compulsory military training was introduced (90 days full time and two years in the Citizen Military Forces) but there was no obligation for active service, in stark contrast with the Vietnam situation.

In the early 1950s it would have been easy to ignore, discredit, and marginalise communist protestors, given the increasing militancy of the Soviet Union demonstrated by the blockade of Berlin in 1948 and related activities around the world. In the normal course of events, the management of leftwing protests should have become even easier after the brutal suppression of the Hungarians in 1956, and again after the re-run of Hungary in Prague in 1968. But it has to be said, foreshadowing a later line of argument, that the course of events ceased to be normal after communism received a huge boost from the heavy-handed anti-communist initiative in the US, namely McCarthyism.

The history of the Vietnam War has been mostly written by those who regard the involvement of the allies as at best a mistake and at worst an immoral act of imperialism. [Writing in 2023, we now realise that the communist occupation of the south would result in the murder of countless business owners and landlords, as in China previously.] The majority of Australians had no strong feelings about the war, many were strongly in favour and most would have been content to live with it, as they had with the Korean War. Among those with memories of World War II, it was accepted without question that regular soldiers who volunteered to join the forces would fight when called upon to do so, and that some of them would die.

The big difference between Korea and Vietnam was conscription. This injected a life-or-death element into the situation of young men—and their families and friends—who had no desire to get involved in a distant conflict which represented no clear and distinct threat to Australia.

The New Protesters

The threat of conscription mobilised a completely different demographic of protesters from the old guard of communists. These included the Save Our Sons movement (1965–1973), Quakers and organised Humanists who tended to be articulate, well-connected, and respectable middle-class citizens who could not be marginalised like the communist-dominated trade unions and the fringe-dwellers of the radical left.

For example Bridget Gilling, the impressively calm and dignified President of the NSW Humanist Society was the Chair of the first NSW Moratorium. The Vietnam war and the conscription issue prompted Gordon Barton to form the Australia Party—forerunner of the Chipp Democrats—which provided a refuge for dissident Liberals who wanted to oppose conscription and/or the war but did not want to join the ALP. (To test the thesis of this paper it would be revealing to find how many of the Liberal activists and voters who shifted to the shortlived Australia Party returned to the Liberals, or moved on to the Democrats or the ALP).

Support for the government was seriously compromised by the way the issues of the war and the draft were conflated. In principle, the two issues could have been separated and a credible position would have been to support the war and oppose conscription (as I argued in “Second Thoughts on Vietnam”, Quadrant, 1987). However the two issues were generally combined, to the great detriment of the case for involvement in the war.

Many people who were positive or open-minded about the war the war but abominated the draft, moved to the anti-war position as a result of friendships and associations formed in anti-conscription activities. So the conscription issue was the thin end of a wedge.

Another wedge was the way the war was depicted. The first placard which I carried in Adelaide in 1968 read “Stop Bombing Hanoi”, a message that could easily be endorsed by a person who supported South Vietnam but objected to the bombing of civilians.

My thesis is that Vietenam debate moved a significant proportion of the educated middle class, (especially the young), from a Coalition-supporting or politically-passive position to voting support or even active involvement with the ALP, or more radical positions. At the same time, with the expansion of the universities, the educated middle class was growing rapidly in numbers.

It is possible that the events of the time did not drive significant changes in political alignment but raised the level of activity and commitment to anti-conservatism by people who were already inclined in that direction. A retired Liberal politician insisted that the mobilization factor, activating young ALP voters to become long-term workers for the ALP cause, was enough to account for the electoral success of the ALP in the 1980s. He accepted that the conscription issue was a major mobilizing factor, however I do not doubt that a considerable number of people shifted their party allegiance as well.

This is implied in Paul Kelly’s statement that the conservatives “lost…a whole generation of politically active young Australians”. Losing the generation is a more damaging result than just energising a part of it, even allowing that the generation was not entirely “lost”. The numbers would be practically impossible to specify at this stage (tracking members of the Australia Party would help) but I know that many ALP voters, like myself at the time, were recruited among people who were not inclined by family background or temperament to support the leftism , and conscription was the conservative pill that we could not swallow.

The revitalised Labor supporters recruits were active and articulate. As time went by they moved into positions of power and influence, both in and out of politics, where their views could be most effectively implemented and propagated: in the media (especially the ABC), in the arts and other literary and cultural pursuits, in teaching of all kinds, in trade union organisations, in the increasingly politicised public service and in the regulative, human rights, ethnic affairs, affirmative action and grievance-related agencies that proliferated post-Whitlam.

The “Swinging Sixties” Factor

Many other changes were taking place during the 1960s and 1970s but it is not immediately apparent that they would have made much difference to the political allegiances of young people. On the left there was a slogan, “the personal is political” but this was the talk of dedicated “in your face” activists and most people made up their own mind about their personal activities without reference to politics. I don’t imagine that members of the Young Liberals were backward in coming forward to participate in sex, soft drugs and rock and roll, though not necessarily in ways that were deliberately calculated to confront and outrage their elders.

The raft of changes included growing affluence, sexual liberation, feminism, increased overseas travel, new trends in rock music, increased use of illicit drugs, the decline of traditional religious affiliation, increased access to university education, and campus radicalism. Apart from the radicalisation of the humanities and soft social sciences on campus these changes appear to be politically neutral. Liberalism is a broad church; indeed it is more open to social change than the traditional working class and trade union base of the labour movement. That was apparent when traditional ALP voters revolted against Paul Keating when he decided to move on from economic reform to social and cultural transformation.

Worldwide radicalism and anti-Americanism

My thesis is apparently undermined by the worldwide rise of radical activities in countries like Britain, France and West Germany where the Vietnam war was not a local issue. Apparently young radicals in those countries did not need to be mobilized by the war or by the threat of conscription, and so surely, it can be argued, there was bound to be a similar move in Australia. [Footnote, on a point of detail, it is interesting that some of the principal players in the highly newsworthy protests at the London School of Economics were draft dodgers from the US, so the war in a sense exported radicalism to Western Europe. It is also noteworthy that even though the worldwide radical movement was not sparked by the Vietnam war, the conflict became a potent image in the movement to represent the forces of capitalism and American “Cold War adventurism” at work.]

In reply, I suggest that it was not the radicals who did long-term damage to the Coalition parties, it was the “respectable protesters” like the middleclass ladies of Save Our Sons. Without the conscription issue the radicals could have been answered in debate and marginalised in the political process. Internal weakness and inconsistency in the conservative case created huge problems for Government supporters in the public debate, and in private conversations around the nation.

The conservative forces in Australia brought themselves undone by the inconsistency between their stated aims (to defend freedom) and the use of conscription. The same thing happened in the US with “McCarthyism” a campaign to expose communists in the early 1950s, led by Senator Joe McCarthy. The problem was real because there were active communist agents of influence in the administration, in academia and elsewhere, including the arts and the film industry. However McCarthy and his helpers were so heavy handed, indiscriminate and insensitive that they produced a reaction in the form of “anti anti-communism”. This movement found fertile ground in intellectual circles where socialist and leftwing thinking were common and it created a smokescreen for seriously subversive influences. The anti-communist forces became confused and divided over the appropriate stance to simultaneously oppose communism and McCarthyism. The prominent libertarian Murray Rothbard was a spectacular example of this process. During the 1960s he aligned with the New Left because he felt that the non-left forces were irretrievably corrupted.

The radical forces around the world found their way made easy by a combination of leftwing dominance in intellectual circles, divisions on the non-left which resulted in half-hearted and fragmented efforts, and most important, by inconsistencies in non-left thinking which promoted self-destructive policies. In this perspective, the conscription issue in Australia represents a paradigm case of electoral self-destruction in the medium to long term.

What Happened to the Centre?

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world…

The best lack all conviction, while the worst

Are full of passionate intensity.

Yeats, “The Second Coming”

The success of the radical left after WW2 in gathering recruits against the backdrop of real and overwhelming tyranny in the communist regimes of the world signals a problem on the “non-left”. In my view the problem was the near-death of classical (non-socialist) liberalism.

The old saying goes “If you are not a socialist at 20, you have no heart. But if you are still a socialist at 40, you have no brains”. The beauty of the classical liberal creed is that it satisfies the needs of people with both warm hearts and active brains.

The four pillars of classical liberalism are (1) a suite of freedoms – speech, belief, movement, trade, association etc, (2) the rule of law, and due process including protection of property rights, (3) limited government under the law and (4) a robust moral code including honesty, compassion, civility, community service, personal responsibility, enterprise.

These principles would underpin a vigorous commercial civilisation with an equally vigorous civic culture, supporting human rights without legalism and bureaucracy. Health, education and welfare could be provided by a mix of private and public services to maximise efficiency and minimise long-term dependency (in the case of welfare).

The four pillars support the pursuit of peace, freedom and prosperity. Anywhere in the world where conditions are improving sustainably, one or more of the pillars are the active ingredients in the policy mix, which of course cannot be found anywhere in a pure form.

In the absence of a visible and clearly articulated “Radical Centre” of classical liberalism, the best that most moderate and reasonable people could find was some version of social democracy. This has the slogans to attract well-meaning and warm-hearted people who want the State to step in and fix up every problem under the sun. This has appeal as long as people understand little economics and no public choice theory to grasp the way interest groups rapidly capture the organs of Big Government and put in train the law of unintended consequences.

So Big Government intervention has achieved bipartisan support in most countries while left-liberalism morphed from the support of civil rights into a vehicle of savage intolerance.

Classical liberalism hardly had a profile in the 20th century and when it revived in the last decades of the century in the form of economic rationalism and the New Right, it attracted roughly equal incomprehension and abuse from both sides of politics. It has had a rough passage but it has a lot to offer.

The point is that a party animated by classical liberalism would not fall into errors like conscription for a foreign war or the debacle of McCarthyism, or the lockdowns of recent memory (added in 2021.)

Conclusion

The conscription issue had a tsunami effect. With barely a ripple on the voting figures at the time, (actually the ascent of Gough Whitlam in 1972 was a rather substantial ripple, but it was a close result) the conservative ships of state sailed on to more election victories until the waves broke on the electoral shores during the 1980s and beyond. As Paul Kelly noted, the leading organisers and activists were recruited long before. It remains to be seen whether the Liberals can retrieve the lost ground and match Labor in recruiting leaders, organizers and activists who can win office in the years to come.

In the bigger picture of the battle of ideas, it remains to be seen whether the carriers of classical liberalism can regain lost ground and propagate these robust and valuable ideas with the same degree of success that Fabians and other socialists achieved.

Radnitzky (1921-2006) was a German-Swedish professor of philosophy of science and one of the first people to see the synergy of ideas from Popper and Hayek.

The bottom line of this long and challenging paper is that the secret of the ‘European Miracle’ has been the evolution of limited government. There is no trade-off between freedom on the one hand and economic success and scientific progress on the other hand. The two are inseparable because economic growth has come from economic freedom and competition, and scientific progress has come from a free market of ideas.

The phenomenon of the ‘Rise of the West’ has been made possible by the evolution of freedom in the economic sphere from political and religious influences, and by other developments leading to the security of property rights. It is an open question whether the relatively free society which grew out of the ‘European Miracle’, will be a unique, fragile and transient exception in human history or an enduring achievement.

It should be noted that the European Community is in the process of dismantling the ‘European Miracle’ or at least placing it under severe strain. A similar process has bipartisan support in the US.

It is a long and challenging paper. Busy people and those who are not deeply steeped in philosophy, political economy, history and evolutionary epistemology will do well to scan the paper and proceed to the conclusion quickly.

CONCLUSION: THE FUTURE IS OPEN

Evolution has no aim. Cultural evolution produced two striking developments: an increase in power, i.e. in man’s opportunity set (Stone Age man possessed the same natural resources as modern man, the difference lies in the knowledge of how to use them in order to better his lot) and an increase in individual freedom. The secret of the ‘European Miracle’ has been the evolution of limited government.

The phenomenon of the westward movement of the ‘Rise of the West’ can only be explained if we keep in mind that the rise of the West has been made possible by the evolution of freedom of the economic sphere from political influence as well as from religious restrictions that lead to the security of property rights.

In Europe, the constraints constituted by geography, in combination with historical accidents, led to a limited scale of political decision-making and multiple sources of decision-making. By attending to changes in the political conditions we can also explain the development from the ‘Economic Miracle’ of Europe to ‘Eurosclerosis’, to the corporatist state.

The cancerous growth of government and the built-in escalation of welfare-state costs is likely to determine the future of Western Europe. This, however, is a problem which all Western democracies face, even if some of them are better off than others.

It is an open question whether the relatively free society, which can support autonomous sciences and is supported by it, which grew out of the ‘European Miracle’ and which constitutes a unique and fragile exception in human history, will be an episode or an enduring achievement.

Much will depend on whether it will be possible to educate the educable sections of the population and above all the future decision makers so that they understand the functioning of modern society and economy. This is a cognitive and also an educational task. The comparative institutions approach outlines the consequences of various institutional arrangements: the ways institutions work out for people living under them, what opportunities various systems offer, what sort of life is possible under them.

It will then be up to the individuals to choose between giving individual freedom priority in the social and public sphere or to accept some form of slavery under a totalitarian system, including unlimited democracy in the sense of the dictatorship of the majority as a special case of totalitarianism. Thus, a position taking on value issues is indispensable.

Hayekians posit the value of individual freedom. In my opinion, the contractarian approach to Constitution and State conceals the value issues. Values are traded off all the time. Sometimes people sell themselves into slavery if they are paid for it — as we witness in connection with the modern welfare state. however, there is no trade-off between freedom on the one hand and economic success and scientific progress on the other hand. The two are inseparable: economic growth has come from economic freedom and competition, and scientific progress has come from a free market of ideas and intertheoretical competition.

Citizen-initiated referendums (CIRs) enable the electorate to vote “no” to a particular piece of legislation, provided that sufficient signatures can be raised on a petition calling for the poll. More ambitious variations on the same theme allow the people to initiate legislation for decision by referendum, and to recall politicians or other elected officials.

Up to the First World War, Australia was one of the leading countries in democratic reforms such as universal adult suffrage and the secret ballot. Walker reports that “The Australian Labor Party, from its earliest days in the 1890s, accepted the principle of initiative and referendum (and later the recall) not merely as policy but as one of the primary objectives of the party.”

Legislation for CIRs was passed in the Labor-controlled Queensland lower house in 1915, but it stopped at the conservative-dominated upper house. After this no serious efforts to promote the people’s vote occurred for many decades and Walker reported that in 1963 the Labor Party dropped it from the party platform.

Three strands of thought are hostile to the principle of the people’s vote; legal positivism, Parliamentary sovereignty and political elitism. Legal positivism sees the essence of law as a product of the power of the state, in contrast with the view that the law is a formalisation of conventional norms and popular consciousness, which is merely administered and enforced by agencies of the state.

Legal positivism has become dominant in academic circles and it provides the basis of the theory of Parliamentary sovereignty. This was expounded in Britain by A V Dicey. According to this view the British Parliament has absolute power to pass statutes as it sees fit, regardless of popular customs and morality. Walker claims that this has been taught as a dogma in law schools and has been carried by lawyers into Parliament, where it is a very congenial notion. It is not generally noticed that Dicey changed his mind on the omnipotence of Parliament and spent the rest of his life campaigning for the people’s vote.

Despite all these adverse influences, local interest in CIRs resulted in numerous submissions to the Constitutional Reform Committee in the 1980s, making the case for the people’s vote. The Committee even suggested that voter-initiated reforms should be introduced for changes in the Constitution, but it recommended that wider use of the system should be deferred until it is tested in constitutional referendums. [That recommendation did not proceed.]

This is a rather timid approach in view of the success of the CIR system in Switzerland, Austria, Italy and 24 states in the USA. The Swiss have had the people’s vote at the canton level since 1830 and at the national level since 1874. A poll to challenge Federal laws can be called by 50,000 voters or eight cantons; similarly, a poll can be called to challenge entry into international treaties or collective security arrangements with other countries. The petition must be received within 90 days of the publication of the law. Partial changes to the Constitution can be initiated by popular request from 100,000 voters.

The matter of referendums became topical in Australia during the 1980s in the campaign against the Australia Card. This illustrated the problem that the people’s vote is supposed to resolve. The Prime Minister claimed to have a mandate from the electorate which returned his government with the aid of Green Party and Democrat Party preferences. However, on the specific issue of the Card, the Democrats sided with the Opposition, and their combined vote across the country exceeded that for the Labour Party by a wide margin (approximately 5 million versus 4.3 million).

Many Labor voters disliked the card but were not prepared to change their vote on that issue alone. However, with the Labor Party back in power, they were prepared to oppose the Card, and some Labour stalwarts were prominent in the anti-Card campaign. At first the Prime Minister promised to “ignore the decibels”, although eventually he sensibly gave way.

In this situation the public could have had their way through the referendum even if the Prime Minister did not back down.

Walker’s most telling arguments in favour of the CIR system concern the decline of representative democracy, with the rise of the party system and the capture of the politicians by special interest groups- “the factions”. Members of the lower houses of Parliament come from defined electorates, but they no longer serve their constituents as they may have done long ago. They are servants of the party and their faction, especially the ruling faction, and their loyalty has been to be proved all the way from preselection to the division in the House.

Traditionally, the members of Parliament were supposed to debate the motions before the House, then cast their votes in line with their stated principles, the interests of their constituents and the public good. But the rise of the party system ensures that the debate preceding the vote is an empty ritual that does nothing to change anyone’s vote. It merely fills in time and enables the more witty speakers to score debating points.

The politicians have been captured by the party system and the parties have been captured by interest groups who threaten to turn the tide of elections by mobilizing blocks of votes in marginal seats where a handful of votes can decide the result (the 100 Macedonians in Rockdale is a notorious example.)

The CIR system would enable the people to defend themselves from predatory interest groups by exercising the power of veto over legislation that hands out special favours to sectional interests. It would also provide the opportunity to have a meaningful vote, at least some of the time [like the recent Voice vote]. For people in “safe” electorates, there is no sense that their vote makes a difference. There is also the frustrating situation where none of the major parties have acceptable policies on some issues. Walker wrote:

“An educated electorate finds it increasingly frustrating to be given a choice only between two packages of personalities and policies when it might prefer to elect certain individuals but reject some of their policies.”

It must be asked why the people’s vote is not more widespread if it is so attractive on the basis of democratic principles and it works effectively in practice. Part of the answer lies with the agents of influence who have accepted the doctrine of Parliamentary sovereignty, partly on conscientious grounds and partly because most belong to lobby groups.

The other part of the answer is very simple. The system has to be put in place by politicians, and they are the people who have most to lose in power and influence under the CIR.

Several objections are routinely raised against the people’s vote. Most of these are provoked by anti-democratic sentiments or by simple misunderstandings. One of the most common criticisms in Australia is that “The system would be hopelessly conservative because Australians always vote No in referendums“. That perception is based on the results of Federal referendums, where there is a record of failure of moves designed to increase the power of the central government. That would appear to reflect sound democratic judgement on the part of the people and the pattern is reversed at the State level where Walker reported a wide margin in favour of Yes votes (20 to 13).

On these figures the voters have no bias towards Yes or No and they are capable of treating issues on their merits. That is also demonstrated by the mixed results recorded in multiple-question referendums, where the critics would expect the same result (NO) on each question.

That demonstrates the great virtue of the referendum: it permits people to treat issues separately, quite unlike the situation in a general election where voters have to take or leave big baskets of policies. Consequently, it is next to impossible to tell from the election results what the electorate really wants on particular issues.

Another objection runs “The system would not work in this particular country (or state)“. This sounds like the familiar bureaucratic response “If it was any good we would have it already”.

It would undermine the existing system of government. This is based on the notion that the final say on political issues should lie with the unchallenged voice of the elected government, regardless of the pros and cons of the issue, the margin of the result, changes in circumstances and the kind of horse-trading that went on over the exchange of preferences in the election. In philosophical circles this is called Parliamentary sovereignty and it denies the spirit of democracy which is supposed to depend on leaders being the servants of the people, not the masters. The second prop to this argument is the idea that the Government knows best. It has been elected on the basis of its honesty, wisdom and sound judgement, so it has a charter to run the place for the duration of its term without interference from the people (or the Opposition). “We won, so get over it!”. There is the implication that the government cannot make mistakes, or if they do the people have no right to complain because they made the call and they had better be prepared to live with it until the next election.

But the electorate is usually confronted with impossible choices at the ballot box. The candidates and the policies are selected by the party machines, and the policies of all parties are a mixture of good, bad and indifferent. The CIR will not undermine the representative system either by replacing it or making it unworkable. It is more likely to improve the current system by encouraging the parties to resist powerful interest groups and strident minorities.

The people will be irresponsible and vote for short-term benefits like low taxes. The usual example of this used to be the Californian Proposition 13 which substantially reduced property taxes. But against that, a later referendum to reduce income tax did not succeed; in other words, the move failed to gain a majority despite its appeal to self-interest in a very immediate way.

“Big money” and the media would have too much influence. Advertising and biased media coverage are most effective when the issues are confused, with bundles of competing policies in general elections. In the referendum, the choices are few and sharply defined.

It is not surprising to find that the record for causes that lacked genuine community support has a dismal record despite some spectacular examples of big spending and media hype in favour of the (ultimately) losing side [the Voice again!]. Walker’s analysis of the evidence suggests that big spending is quite likely to rebound in favour of the other side.

With the major arguments against the people’s vote apparently refuted, it remains to be seen whether the politicians will rediscover the democratic spirit which animated the Labor Party of the 1890s. Will they introduce a sytem to make themselves more accountable to the voters between elections?

Almost 40 years later, the answer is “No”.

.

To summarize one of the conclusions of this paper, the equal opportunity movement of modern times is valuable but the shift from equal opportunity to affirmative action is practically irresistible for people who are impatient to better the lot of their fellows. The shift may appear to be modest and subtle but it has converted the equal opportunity and anti-racist movement into a vehicle of racism, intolerance, division and destruction.

This paper suggests that some aspects of Plato’s thought poisoned the well of western thought and the Black Lives Matter movement can be seen as one of the consequences.

How do we get from the works of the greatest philosopher of all time, the Divine Philosopher, to a movement that has triggered a deadly rampage of looting and arson with almost overwhelming approval among progressive leftwing people around the world?

Western philosophy has been described as footnotes to Plato and among the footnotes is The Open Society and Its Enemies with Popper’s critique the totalitarian elements in Plato’s later works, especially Republic and Laws. Popper found at last four elements of totalitarian thought in Plato. First, “racialism” or “race thinking” as Barzun called it. Second is the concept of collective justice that Plato proposed to replace individual justice that was customary in Athens or at least in the rhetoric of the Pericles and the Great Generation of Athenian democrats. Third is revolutionary canvas cleaning to sweep away everything old and start again. Fourth is fake news that Plato dignified with the title of Noble or Lordly Lies. Noble lies Starting with the last of the four, a noble lie can be defined as a myth or untruth knowingly propagated by an elite to maintain social harmony or to advance an agenda.

Starting with the last of those, what is the empirical basis for BLM, what is the evidence that the deaths of blacks at the hands of the police are symptoms of racism? In 2016 when the BLM movement was two years old Heather Mac Donald collated the official statistics to compare the homicide rates for blacks, whites and Hispanics. She found that blacks were being killed at six times the rates for whites and Hispanics. In Los Angeles blacks between the ages of 20 and 24 were dying at a rate that was 20 to 30 times the national average. That is an alarming disparity and it is very important to realise that it was mostly a function of the black crime rate because blacks themselves were committing homicide at eight times the rate of whites and Hispanics combined and eleven times the rate of whites alone.

Overwhelmingly blacks were being killed by other blacks, and not by the police. Only 4% of black homicide victims were killed by police, compared with 12% of all white and Homicide deaths caused by police. On that basis she suggested that a more appropriate slogan to raise concern about police killings would be White and Hispanic Lives Matter. The point is that the “news” about systematic bias towards blacks, based on the statistics of black deaths, is fake. It has been transformed into a Noble or Lordly lie in the supposedly worthy cause of anti-racism.

Mac Donald explained that the main effect of the movement, two years on, was to reverse the decline in violent crime that had been achieved in some cities in previous years by innovations in evidence-based law enforcement, including rapid responses to incidents in problem areas and proactive strategies to defuse potentially dangerous situations. Violent crime spiked upwards, especially in cities with large black populations like Baltimore, Nashville and Chicago.

She called this “The Ferguson Effect” after Ferguson in Missouri where the BLM movement started after police shot a black teenager. No charges were laid and this triggering weeks of protest across the country. After five months of re-examination of witness statements, forensic reports and other evidence the Justice Department concluded that the officer fired in self-defence.

Last year the “George Floyd effect” went worldwide. The George Floyd case is supposed to be a paradigm of systematic racism expressed by white police killing blacks. The symbolism is powerful especially when it is taken up the mainstream media and social media as well but it is a gross distortion of the bigger picture.

As Forest Gump famously put it “Shit happens.” Violent crime is rampant in some black communities and police (black and white alike) have the thankless task of dealing with desperately dangerous situations.

Would the destructive and divisive activities of the BLM movement be vindicated if there are genuine cases of racist crimes by white police? No doubt there are. There are bad apples in every barrel (it was said, regarding a particular US police force, there are some good apples in every barrel as well). If white police murder people, black or white, armed or unarmed, they need to face the full force of the law, with due process. But the cases of black deaths that we know about do not even start to establish a case for systemic racism.

The cases that we know about where white police kill blacks in dubious circumstances are rare because if they were not rare we would be told a lot more about them by the BLM and its supporters and apologists. Some of the cases of unarmed black deaths at the hands of white police are tendentious in the extreme if you want to make a case for white racism.

Consider the case of a black man who almost killed a police office by running him down in a car before he was shot to protect the officer; the case of a black man who was killed after he kicked a policeman unconscious and turned on another officer, the case of a man wanted on firearms offences who took refuge in a building and threatened to blast the police to hell. When he ran out and charged the police he was shot because it was not immediately apparent if he was armed or not.

Police have to be prepared to shoot criminals who are attacking them with knives because stabbing can be fatal and police often have to make very quick decisions in desperate situations. The statistical evidence demonstrates that the problem of black deaths is overwhelmingly a problem of blacks killing other blacks. As Mac Donald put it, on the numbers, the more appropriate slogan regarding police killings would be “White and Hispanic Lives Matter.”

Race thinking. Taking up the first theme on the list, I am not suggesting that reading Republic was the immediate inspiration for the protesters in the streets, we will get to that by way of Jacques Barzun.

Popper described what he called racialism in Plato’s plan for a stratified society ruled by an elite group of philosopher kings. The rulers are essentially a master race and it was vital to maintain the purity of the race by selective breeding. “To this end, it is important that the master class should feel as one superior master race.” And the race of the guardians must be kept pure.

The idea of a pure race of rulers combined with other ideas like the myth of the chosen people to produce the concept of the Aryan master race that underpinned the Nazi program of genocide and the thousand year Reich. That is probably the most publicised example of the pathological consequences of the “master race” meme but it is much more widespread as Barzun explained in The French Race (1932) and Race: A Study of Superstition (1937).

He proposed that one of the inflammatory and divisive factors leading up to the French Revolution was a protracted dispute in France over the “race” of the nobility versus the bourgeoisie as. Having identified the phenomenon that he called “race thinking” in that context he went on to argue that this way of thinking is a pervasive factor in the struggles between nations, political parties, religious faiths and social groups.

For Barzun “race thinking” is one of the ways to justify collective hostility and it is most dangerous and powerful when it operates in partnership with other motives such as the nationalism of the Nazi and the socialism of the communists. “Marxist doctrine at its purest is in form and effect racist thought. The class struggle is but the old race antagonism of French nobles and commoners write large and made ruthless. Marx’s bourgeois is not a human being with individual traits but a social abstraction, a creature devoid of virtue or free will and without the right to live.” (Barzun 1965, xi)

He wrote “As long as people permit themselves to think of human groups without the vivid sense that groups consist of individuals and that individuals display the full range of human differences, the tendency which twenty-eight years ago I named ‘race-thinking’ will persist.” (ibid, ix)

Another factor in the mix is “the landmine in Western thought” articulated by Paul Craig Roberts. He wrote “The 18th century Enlightenment had two results that combined to produce a destructive formula. On the one hand, Christian moral fervor was secularised, which produced demands for the moral perfectibility of society. On the other hand, modern science called into question the reality of moral motives.” (Roberts 1991). These tendencies might appear to be contradictory but they have not balanced each other. The first drives demands for the immediate and comprehensive rectification of all the forms of injustice and inequality which are attributed to our traditional mores and the institutions of democratic capitalism. The other undermines any defence that might be offered for those mores and institutions. The result is an explosive mixture of moral indignation and moral relativism or scepticism.

Barzun continued his appraisal of the situation in the United States in the 1960s “The clamour and the wailing should not mislead us. It is our success that has caused it.” (Barzun 1954, 17) An example of success was the marked narrowing of the differential between white and Afro American wages through the 1940s and the 1950s, before legislation for affirmative action. But a degree of success was not enough for the coercive utopians and they discovered the power of discovering social crises, even if the situation was improving, such as teenage pregnancy, poverty and the murder rate in the 1950s (Sowell 1988).

Sowell's international study of affirmative action described the gap between the rhetoric and the reality of preference policies and the pattern of events which he found around the world. Generally the demand for preferential policies came from well educated, 'new class' members of supposedly disadvantaged groups. The same people also become the main beneficiaries of preference policies which tend to further disadvantage the majority of their bretheren.

This was demonstrated in Malaysia where the gap between rich and poor Malays widened in the wake of preference policies for ethnic Malays (Sowell 1990, 49). One of the advocates of the program even admitted that this was the case but claimed that the Malays prefer to be exploited by their own kind.

Collective justice is another Platonic theme in the mix, that is, justice for groups rather than individuals. This fits like a glove with racist thinking as Barzun described it - “thinking of human groups without the vivid sense that groups consist of individuals and that individuals display the full range of human differences.”

Traditional or individualistic justice, as described by Popper in his critique of Plato, “calls for equal treatment of the citizens before the law, provided, of course, that the laws show neither favour nor disfavour towards individual citizens or groups or classes.” There are three main demands or proposals, namely (a) the proposal to eliminate ‘natural privileges’ (no special classes), (b) justice applies to individuals rather than groups and (c) a major function of the state to protect the freedom of the citizens. This means that individuals should be treated according to their personal characteristics such as their fitness and qualifications for particular tasks, and the quality of their performance.

As long as the qualities required for the tasks are not race-related there is no need to make race an issue. Barzun warned that if race is made an issue in any process of selection or evaluation of people then “race-thinking” will continue and this will generate muddled thinking and inappropriate actions with potentially dangerous unintended consequences.

In 1965 Barzun’s book on race, a study of superstition, was reprinted with a new Preface “Racism Today” to take account of the civil rights movement at the time. In the wake of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 he wrote that giving up race-thinking means equal opportunity but not affirmative action.

He pointed out that because there are no positive or negative traits that are race-related it follows that “sentimental or indignant reversals of the racist proposition are false and dangerous… Race-thinking is bad thinking and that is all.” (ibid, xiv)

On the topic of affirmative action he wrote “When injustice is redressed, the hitherto outcast and maligned group must not benefit in reverse from the racism they justly complained of. They do not suddenly possess, as a group, the virtues they were previously denied, and it is no sign of wisdom in the former oppressors to affect a contrite preference for those they once abused.” (ibid, xv)

He recalled a report from a Fullbright scholar in Paris who witnessed a memorable celebration in the Latin Quarter. A contingent of white writers and artists led by Negro writers and accompanied by French and American students ceremonially burned the white race in effigy! He regarded that as an emblem of suicide by both parties because inverting the racial hierarchy leaves race-thinking intact and probably even stronger than before because it is sanctified by the self-righteous sense of correcting a great injustice.

That mood has been engendered by the worldwide BLM movement. It has legitimized vandalism, arson and looting, as though this is going to correct injustice and benefit people of colour. What does it do for a person of colour with a small business in Minneapolis who has their livelihood burned to the ground?

What is the case for collective white guilt and reparations for all blacks to be paid by whites here and now? That will mean transfers to many people who are not in difficult circumstances from whites who could be worse off, who moreover had no involvement in the activities that are supposed to earn reparations for the benefit of people who have not personally suffered the disadvantages of the Jim Crow laws and other forms of discrimination in the past.

What about the white trash. Who cares about their disadvantage? Is anyone suggesting affirmative action policies for poor white males?

As for equal opportunity, nobody can reasonably object to the elimination of barriers to the advancement of females and other groups. But affirmative action is racist straight up and it not only disadvantages white males, it also places a question mark over the merit of successful members of the favoured groups. Favouritism is generally regarded as a bad thing, and that is for very good reasons. Favouritism is institutionalised by affirmative action and erodes the morale of organizations. It also undermines the integrity of the educational and selection systems that administer affirmative action programs.

Violent canvas-cleaning. Popper treated this in Chapter 9 of The Open Society on Aestheticism, Perfectionism and Utopianism, headed by an extract from a novel by Du Gard – “Everything has got to be smashed to start with. Our whole damned civilization has got to go, before we can bring any decency into the world.”

Popper wrote about the way the Platonic artist-politician must proceed; he must eradicate the existing institutions and traditions, he must purify, purge, expel, banish, and kill, with a reference to “liquidation” as a modern term for it.

“Asked about the details of their draughtsmanship, Plato’s ‘Socrates’ gives the following striking reply: ‘They will take as their canvas a city and the characters of men, and they will, first of all, make their canvas clean—by no means an easy matter. Plato’s statement is indeed a true description of the uncompromising attitude of all forms of out-and-out radicalism—of the aestheticist’s refusal to compromise."

The idea of sweeping away the old to bring in the new in the most wide-ranging possible manner became a motif of the French Revolution and subsequent socialist revolutions including the Chinese Cultural Revolution. The current vogue of overturning historical monuments is a particularly vivid expression of the desire to clean the canvas and get rid of the past so we can start again, fresh and pure.

Conclusion. Consider the prima facie purpose of the BLM movement, to rectify the evils of racism, and especially the shooting of unarmed black men by white policemen. Are the means suited to the end? What evils can be corrected by looting and arson, overturning historical monuments, suppressing free speech and taking the police off the streets?

People who are familiar with the work of Jacques Barzun on racist thinking will see that the most obvious feature of the movement in addition to violence and intolerance is flamboyant and blatant racism. Based on Barzun’s account of racial thinking, this movement is not going to eliminate or mitigate racist thinking, instead it is promoting racism and using it as a weapon for some other agenda.

References

Mac Donald, Heather, 2016, “The Danger of the ‘Black Lives Matter’ Movement”, Imprimis, Hillsdale College.

Barzun, Jacques. 1932 The French Race: Theories of Its Origins and Their Social and Political Implications. Port Washington, NY: Kennikat Press.

Barzun, Jacques. 1937. Revised 1965. Race: a Study in Modern Superstition. New York: Harper & Row. Barzun, Jacques. 1954. God's Country and Mine: A Declaration of Love, Spiced with a Few Harsh Words. Boston: Little, Brown and Company.

Sowell, Thomas.1988. Endangered Freedoms. CIS Occasional Papers 22. The Fourth John Bonython Lecture. Sydney: Centre for Independent Studies.

Sowell, Thomas. 1990. Preferential Policies: An International Perspective. New York: William Morrow and Company.

“I want the reader to consider whether the survival of the democratic system may not be dependent upon a general recognition of the illegitimacy of privately motivated coercion in all forms”. The particular form of coercion that Hutt had in mind of course was the violence of striking workers.

Lady Barbara Wootton of the British Labor Party, cited by Hutt (STS, p viii). It is “the duty of a union to be anti-social; the members would have a just grievance if their officials and committees ceased to put sectional interest first.”

He challenged eight assumptions about labour relations that are enshrined in Labor history and mythology.

1. The industrial revolution and the factory system resulted in a period of brutal exploitation of the labouring masses.

2. The workers were frustrated and oppressed by the Combination Acts which were designed to favour the employers and to prevent the workers from forming associations.

3. Labour has an inherent disadvantage in the contest with capital unless the state intervenes to provide assistance, especially by protecting the right to engage in collective bargaining and strike activity.

4. Labour had to wage a bitter struggle to achieve improved pay and conditions.

5. Collective bargaining by the trade unions is a manifestation of the solidarity of the working class to resist exploitation and get a fair go.

6. Wage rates are “indeterminate” so it is good for unions to bargain as hard as they can to get the best possible pay and conditions.

7. Strike activity with the use of violence against non-conforming workers is morally legitimate to adjust for the imbalance of power between labour and capital.

8. Collective bargaining, with strikes or the threat of strikes, is not only morally legitimate but it was also necessary to improve the share of the common wealth between labour and capital.

These views are deeply entrenched in the mythology and the ethos of the labour movement and in the community at large because they have been propagated in standard histories and in works of fiction (novels, films, songs, plays, and other works of art) and in folklore generally. As a result, most of them, if not all, would gain practically universal assent, even among people who deplore the abuses of trade union power and influence in modern times.

The positive function of trade unions

It will be helpful to anticipate the predictable response from some quarters that this is all just “union bashing”. Neither Hutt nor any other responsible commentator has ever suggested that associations of workers should be suppressed, and that was never the intention or the outcome of the British Combination Acts. Associations of workers had (and have) many useful functions in addition to acting as friendly societies for health and welfare provision. They could help their members to improve their qualifications and locate the best paid work, and they could provide legal advice and other assistance to members subjected to unfair treatment by management.

Even supporters of the centralized Australian system such as Keith Hancock know that the only way to improve the position of the workers at large is by way of increased productivity. This means that responsible unions will work enthusiastically with management to lift productivity by implementing improved work practices and new technologies. That is likely to reduce the need for personnel on site for the time being and that has prompted the unions to protect jobs in the short term rather than implement improved practices. Where unions succeed in that aim there is a cost in job creation both upstream and downstream from overmanned and inefficient sites. Progress occurs through the creation and destruction of jobs and the main game is to make both of those processes as painless as possible without cramping productivity and efficiency.

1. The brutality of the factory system

This is the idea that the industrial revolution and the factory system resulted in a period of brutal suffering for the working. For example Bertrand Russell wrote in The Impact of Science on Society “The industrial revolution caused unspeakable misery both in England and America. I do not think that any student of economic history can doubt that the average happiness in England in the early nineteenth century was lower than it had been a hundred years earlier; and this was due almost entirely to scientific technique”. This contention does not relate directly to the issue of trade union powers and privileges but the almost universal assumption of the horrors of the industrial system ensures that most people start off on the wrong foot when they start to think about industrial relations and wage fixing.

Hutt’s first published paper in 1925 was an exposure of the fraudulent 1832 Sadler report that provided much of the false and misleading information that ended up in the standard histories of the factory system (Cole, the Hammonds, the Webbs). Like the more recent report on the so-called stolen generation, witnesses were carefully selected and the evidence was cherry-picked to produce a wildly inaccurate picture of the conditions in the cotton mills. Engels, (the sponsor and supporter of Karl Marx) wrote that the committee “was emphatically partisan, composed by strong enemies of the factory system for party ends…Sadler permitted himself to be betrayed by his noble enthusiasm into the most distorted and erroneous statements." Sadler’s work may be best described as a counter-attack by the Tories who were upset by their defeat on tariff protection and wanted to attack trade, industry and the new factory system by hook or by crook. The anti-market beliefs engendered by this piece of work and others of the same ilk have underpinned the counterproductive policies demanded by both radicals and economically illiterate conservatives to the present day. Hutt’s paper is on line at this address.

http://www.the-rathouse.com/Revivalist4/RC_FactorySystem.html

The Sadler report was so biased that a second committee convened with
evidence taken under oath and a better representation of medical men and
other witnesses. The more balanced picture delivered by the second
committee never attracted the attention of the historians.

A doctor noted that the conditions in the factories compared favourably with the great public (private) schools, rife with bullying and sadistic disciplinary practices, where the gentry sent their own children. Others pointed out that the domestic servants of the Tories who supported the reform worked longer hours than the millhands. Various of the Bronte girls, barred from factory work by their class and working as governesses, recorded bitter discontent in their letters at their hours and their pay compared with the situation of the girls in the mills.

Conditions improved for the masses as a result of the industrial revolution, although of course all boats did not rise at the same time or the same rate. The protracted Napoleonic wars caused a great deal of damage that would have slowed the rate of progress but that is rarely considered by critics of industrialisation.

2, 3 and 4. The Suppression of the Trade Unions, the Disadvantage of Labour and the Bitter Struggle.

According to the standard labour account, the English Combination Acts of 1799 and 1800 were deliberately designed to favour the employers and to prevent the workers from forming associations. One of the often-repeated stories to support this perception is the fate of the Tolpuddle Martyrs who were transported to Australia.

In the chapter “Labour’s Bitter Struggle” in The Strike Threat System (STS), Hutt sketched the history of the relevant legislation from the Middle Ages to the nineteenth century. The chapter is on line at this address

http://www.the-rathouse.com/Revivalist4/WH_BitterStruggle.html

From the thirteenth century, the conviction clearly emerged that certain antisocial practices affecting the pricing of prod­ucts (including the product of labor) had to be restrained for the common good. Thus, practices known as ‘forestalling, engrossing and regrating’ were forbidden by ordinances and statutes because these were supply and pricing procedures which were perceived to be exploiting the common people through the contriving of scarcities of food and necessities. (STS, p 28)

In other words the clear intent of this kind of legislation was to control what we would nowadays call restrictive trade practices. Hutt cited numerous examples of the application of these laws: in 1298 an organization of coopers in London was prosecuted for having agreed to raise the price of hoops; in 1339 there were cases brought against London carpenters; in 1349 against shoemakers; in 1773 the publicans of Westminster were warned that if they raised the price of beer collusively they would be prosecuted for conspiracy. It is important to note that the merchant and craft guilds that were constituted by royal charter enjoyed the privilege of being above the laws that controlled restrictive trade practices by other people.

Hutt wrote “The Webbs suggest, however, that in the eighteenth century, the common law was ‘constrained’ to convict striking workers. They present no clear evidence of any such ‘constraint.’ The facts suggest (1) that the tradition of no discrimination against labor was maintained, and (2) that there was con­siderable leniency in the administration of the existing laws when the al­leged offense occurred in the form of strikes or strike preparations.” (STS, p 30).

Against the undocumented claim of “constraint” Hutt cited numerous instances of strike activity where the managers and the authorities were slow to make recourse to the law and willing to settle on a compromise. In serious cases of provocation, when matters came to court and the offence was proved, the penalties were lenient by the standards of the time.

As to the idea that the Combination Act of 1799 and the amended Act of 1800 represented a carefully planned and premeditated onslaught on the rights of the workers, on Hutt’s account:

The 1799 Act came to be passed almost by accident…What actually hap­pened in 1799 was that a bill, more or less in the form of the 40 or so other anticombination statutes already applying to particular trades, was in­troduced in Parliament. The original aim in 1799 was simply to forbid “conspiracy” on the part of millwrights. During the proceedings Wilberforce (the famous antislavery champion) suddenly and unexpectedly moved for an amendment to make the principle apply to all industries and occupations. There seemed to be no good reason for opposing this amendment and the bill became law…

Hardly a bad thing, given the intention to control restrictive trade practices.

The important point to remember is that the new combination laws did not make any activities illegal which had not already been criminal offenses for centuries…Yet they are described as ‘severe,’ as inaugurating ‘a new and momentous departure, ‘a far-reaching change of policy,’ an era of ‘legal persecution’ of would-be strikers or strikers. These are descriptions of the acts by Sidney and Beatrice Webb, in a seriously slanted work characterized at times by meticulous scholarship—a work which has had an enormous influence in spreading the myth.

Hutt cited a great deal of evidence to indicate that the masters and the authorities bent over backwards to avoid prosecutions. Then, as now, the masters and managers recognized that they were best served by a harmonious and productive workforce, not one that was alienated and embittered.

The most commonly cited case that has been used to demonstrate the “savagery of the legal repression” that was ushered in by the Combination Acts is the action against the Tolpuddle martyrs. For example Hugh Stretton in his recent book Australia Fair referred to “some Luddite defenders of their traditional rights [who] had been charged, convicted and transported to New South Wales”.

Hutt reported:

This case involved farm workers who were trying to form an organization to force up their wage rates. They had established the ‘Friendly Society of Agricultural Laborers’ for their village. Now as a friendly society, such an association was encouraged [by an Act of 1793] rather than discouraged by the law. But as a cloak for illegal activities (including “conspiracy”), it was not immune from prosecution. In the Tolpuddle case, however, the alleged crime was not conspiracy, but “unlawful oaths.” The society, which had an elaborate ritual and rather frightening paraphernalia—for example, a picture of Death, “painted six feet high”—was demanding loyalty through the administration of oaths. (STS, p 37)

Such preparations were apt to lead to the burning of haystacks and even murder. The Reverend Patrick Bronte, living on the outskirts of a Yorkshire village through the Luddit disturbances, slept with a loaded pistol at his bedside in case of attack. (Each morning he discharged his pistol through the bedroom window into the nearby cemetery). Still the local justices were reluctant to launch a prosecution and instead warned the conspirators that the penalty for their activities was transportation. Under the previous Act the penalty was death and Hutt suggested that the reduced penalty may have encouraged the conspirators in their defiance. They persisted with their activities and a case was brought against five of the leaders, though all those involved could have been charged.

It was proved that illegal oaths had been administered—in view of the explicit warning, it seems quite recklessly and defiantly…The law (wise or unwise) was clear-cut. The offenses were proven. The court had no option. Yet the Webbs describe the conviction of the Tolpuddle offenders as a ‘scandalous perversion of the law;’ and because the sentence to transportation was confirmed by the Home Secretary, the Webbs refer to his ‘policy of repression.’ (STS, p 37)

The Webbs apparently neglected to mention that five years of the seven-year sentences were subsequently remitted. Hutt noted that reduced sentences or quashed convictions were common in conspiracy cases. He also pointed out the need to see the sentences in the context of the times. The criminal law at that time imposed extremely harsh penalties for offenses of all kinds. Secondly, the official attitude from the government, down to judges and magistrates, supported by public opinion, was strongly influenced by the Terror after the French Revolution. People in England did not want to be so short-sighted and weak that fanatics could get out of control.

To summarise the results of Hutt’s research on this topic, there is no reason to believe that the workers, as distinct from groups participating in restrictive trade practices, were subjected to any novel or oppressive constraints under the Combination Acts of 1799 and 1800, or indeed any other legislation, before or since.

More on Labour’s Disadvantage

The idea of the inherent disadvantage of labour has been a potent influence in gaining widespread acceptance of the systematic use of violence and intimidation to pursue industrial claims. The mythology of struggle, “us against them”, is explicit in the radical Marxist worldview and also in the militant but not necessarily Marxist sections of the labour movement.

Human nature being what it is, there is no doubt that cases of unfair treatment, including unfair dismissals, are going to occur. It is here that an association of workers has a role to play in providing advice, legal aid and assistance as required. There is a world of difference between the damage that is done in individual cases of unfair treatment and the mass unemployment and immiseration caused by the strike threat system in the course of obtaining better wages and conditions for the “bloody aristocracy” of labour.

Hutt challenged both of the myths (disadvantage and bitter struggle) in The Theory of Collective Bargaining (CB) and The Strike Threat System. It is not clear when there ever was disadvantage on the labour side because the history of industrial legislation from 1824 (repeal of the Combination Acts) is a record of the scales being tipped more and more in favour of labour at the expense of capital and managers. After the passage of the Combination Acts in 1799/1800 both the Tory and Whig Parliamentary representatives from industrial districts began to compete with each other in promises to abolish the offending Acts. This was achieved in 1824.

Even without a leg up from the government, trade unionists soon learned to use a variety of techniques to obtain their objectives by destructive and productivity-eroding means: the strike in detail, when one competing firm after another is subjected to strike activity; the “go slow” or work to rule; bogus safety issues and outright sabotage at sensitive stages of work such as concrete pours, harvesting and the transport of perishable goods. The question has to be asked, what do they think they are achieving for the workers at large and the common good, by these tactics? Lady Barbara Wootton of the British Labor Party provided an answer, cited by Hutt (STS, p viii). It is “the duty of a union to be anti-social; the members would have a just grievance if their officials and committees ceased to put sectional interest first.” This brings us to the solidarity of the workers.

Myth 5. Working class solidarity vs the bloody aristocracy of labour.

One of the most resonant myths about the origin of the strike-threat system is that it emerged out of a concerted struggle of the poor against subjec­tion by the employers. Hutt wrote:

The truth is that, with hardly any exceptions, it was relatively affluent artisans (by contemporary standards) who first organized for the collusive pricing of their labour. And their motive was, in every case, to defend their privileges—special rights which were contrary to the interests of the poorer classes. The Webbs describe the union system as “strengthening the almost infinite grading of the industrial world into separate classes, each with its own distinctive ends, and each therefore exacting its own ‘rent of opportunity’ or ‘rent of ability.” (STS, p 26)

Hutt pointed out that the last terms actually refer to privilege, though the Webbs were too delicate or biased to say so. The Webbs sometimes admitted the existence of monopolistic tendencies on the part of unions, but they never publicly deplored the downside of militant unionism even though during the Great Depression Sydney Webb wrote scathing comments in his diary, referring to the union leadership as “greedy pigs”…”sabotaging British industry”

For a more realistic opinion Hutt turned to some alternative views, such as William Thompson,.

Thompson can hardly be regarded as a biased witness against working-class bodies. He was, we are told, of the most kindly and gentle disposition, but when he considered the workmen's combinations of his day he was moved to passionate condemnation of them. To him they were “bloody aristocracies of industry...The apprenticeship or excluding system depended on mere force and would not allow other workers to come into the market at any price…It matters not,” he said in 1827, “whether that force…be the gift of law or whether it be assumed by the tradesmen in spite of the law: it is equally mere force.” (CB, p 10)

Gains of the few within the circle of the combination] were always “at the expense of the equal right of the industrious to acquire skill and to exchange their labour where and how they may.” This is the founder of scientific Socialism speaking - not an employer. “Will they then resort to force to put down the competition of the great majority of the industrious and thus erect a bloody (for force will lead to blood and without blood no aristocracy can be supported) aristocracy of industry?”. (CB, p 10)

The early literature of the trade union movement is full of with abuse amounting virtually to dehumanisation of the unemployed or lesser workers, ‘knobsticks’ and ‘scabs’, who were regarded as a threat. J S Mill summed up this attitude in his attempted justification of enlightened unionism in 1869. Acting as the unions' advocate he put the following words into the mouth of their witness:

Those whom we exclude are amorally inferior class of labourers to us; their
labour is worthless and their want of prudence and self-restraint makes them more active in adding to the population. We do them no wrong by entrenching ourselves behind a barrier, to exclude those whose competition would bring down our wages, without more than momentarily raising theirs, but only adding to the total numbers in existence. (CB, p 11)

So much for the solidarity of the working class. As Hutt suggested, it is mostly about the protection of privilege. Antipathy towards other workers who happen to be outsiders to the privileged group is the very reverse of working class solidarity and this is expressed in demarcation disputes and contests for membership and control of the workplace. Above everything else the lack of solidarity of the working class is manifest in the pay and conditions achieved by the most powerful unions, through strikes and the threat of strikes and other exclusionary and productivity-eroding practices that have damaged other industries, the workers in those industries and the community at large.

6. Wages are “indeterminate”.

An essential prop for the theory of collective bargaining is the idea that wage rates are “indeterminate” so that it is essential to push for a higher rate, like a determined seller haggling at a market stall. One of the fallacies in that analogy is that a potential buyer at a market stall can refuse to accept the price that a seller demands, they can walk away and leave the item for others to make an offer. But the striking workers who walk away from their jobs do not leave them for others to take up, they enforce a picket line to keep the facility idle until such time as they choose to return. And a factory owner, unlike a buyer of merchandise, is not usually in a position to walk away and leave the investment behind. That is also a part of the argument against the idea of the natural advantage of capital.

7. The moral legitimacy of violence by trade unionists.

At this point we approach the remaining assumptions with some layers of protective misinformation cleared out of the way. But still the going is likely to be heavy.

Unfortunately most writing on this topic is emotion-charged. That is hardly surprising. The strike is a form of warfare and the expectation of its use—as a fact or as a threat—has come to condition nearly all private policy in determining wage offers. The strike-threat system has created a species of continuous aggression and resistance to aggression; and union policymakers have felt it essential to keep alive suspicion and hostility toward management and investors…Time-honored but virtually fictional stories of the inequities and iniquities of former days are propagated and reiterated with conviction by public-spirited novelists, journalists, jurists, clergymen, and academics, as well as by parties seeking to exploit the myths. (STS, p 22)

Hutt noted that exploiters of aggressive nationalism usually make much of legendary struggles for “freedom” in ages past, so unionists and their apologists have perpetuated the myths of “labour’s bitter history.”

The threat of violence is usually kept hidden (the gun under the table) as much as possible in genteel talk about “collective bargaining”. This is the term invented by Sydney and Beatrice Webb to describe the function of trade unions when they represent the workers to negotiate with management on wages and conditions. It is particularly useful for their purposes because it conveys a picture of convivial and benevolent solidarity among the workers. As described above, this picture has turned out to be an illusion. Worse, the innocent sounding words do not signal the role of violent coercion, which has usually been an ingredient of strike action, which in turn is an essential adjunct to collective bargaining.

The question of the moral legitimacy of “the right to strike” is confused by the different meanings of “strike” and “the right to strike”. It is often presented as a self-evident fact that workers have the right to absent themselves from the workplace in a free society. From this it is supposed to follow that there is a right to have mass “absenting” when the shop stewards signal “all out”.

Leaving aside the matter of contractual agreements that may be violated by leaving work at short notice, the gritty moral issues arise when (a) not all the workers want to go out and (b) management tries to recruit replacement workers for the ones who have gone out.

What is the legitimate use of violence? It is generally accepted that the state, or at least agents of the state, have the right and indeed the duty to use violence (under clearly defined rules) to maintain law and order and to protect the realm. The lawful use of private violence is generally restricted to self-defence. In the light of this principle, the use of violence by trade unions to enforce conformity in strikes and the use of violence on picket lines is clearly outside the law unless the law has been revised to permit the unions to operate outside the limits that apply to everyone else.

Hutt put the question in strong terms in The Strike Threat System – “I want the reader to consider whether the survival of the democratic system may not be dependent upon a general recognition of the illegitimacy of privately motivated coercion in all forms”. The particular form of coercion that he had in mind of course was the violence of striking workers.

The acceptance of trade union violence is one of the great blemishes on the face of the western democracies. The tolerance that is extended to trade unionists in that respect (and not generally to common criminals) reflects the hold on the popular imagination that is exerted by the mythology of the labour movement. This was very clear during the waterfront dispute of recent memory when the liberal intelligentsia and sympathetic commentators in the media lined up to support the wharfies without blinking an eye over the potentially lethal violence that they were using. The ultimate absurdity of their stance was demonstrated by the suggestion or implication that the substitute dockworkers were equipped with balaclavas and dogs in order to inflict violence instead of the real reason which was to save themselves and their families from violent retribution.

8. Collective bargaining to even up the shares between labour and capital.

Reasonable and peace-loving supporters of the labour movement may concede that violence in industrial relations is an evil, but they may argue that it is (or was) a necessary evil to obtain justice for the downtrodden and disadvantaged. Can these people continue to defend the strike threat system if it is demonstrated that the main beneficiaries are the most reckless and violent players, the “bloody aristocracy of labour” whose members achieve pay and conditions that most other workers, white and blue collar alike, can only dream about?

;
Conclusion.

Mistaken views about the past are a living force in the present, as shown by a letter to the Sydney Daily Telegraph 10 April 2006:

Union membership has fallen steadily, in part because of the institutionalised protection that up until now has been built into the industrial system.

Unionism itself arose as a response to the unrestrained greed and uncaring attitude of the early industrialists. That greed and uncaring attitude is alive and well today and more common than many of us would like to think possible.

Nothing concentrates the thought processes like self-preservation, and people are worried about their future and the future of their children.

I believe that Mr Howard’s much-vaunted political nous is awry in this instance and there will be a reckoning.

For the record, I am not a union man or, up to now, a Labor voter. But I am worried and I vote.

We need to learn from the mistakes of the past if we can, otherwise we may have to repeat them. Many people will not find all of the views in this paper congenial at first glance and some will strongly dissent. The nature of the objections will be revealing and it will be interesting to note how many people offer considered arguments and evidence to support their case and how many adopt the approach described by Stuart Macintyre in The History Wars.

They obey only Rafferty’s rules. They caricature their opponents and impugn their motives. They appeal to loyalty, hope, fear and prejudice. In their intimidation of the history profession, they act as bullies. In submitting history to the loyalty test, they debase it. (p 222)

Of course people who have imbibed the eight assumptions virtually with their mothers milk and those who use them to justify their own careers will need some time to assimilate Hutt’s message. Strange as it may seem, some may not even try to do so.

If Hutt’s ideas turn out to be robust even in part, then interesting questions will be asked about the academics and other intellectuals who were supposed to be tending the flame of independent scholarship.

He was convinced that the poor and the weak will be major beneficiaries from the market order, operating under the rule of law, in a moral framework that includes honesty and compassion. This especially applies to the unemployed who for various reasons ranging from partial handicaps to lack of training and experience have to be junked from the workforce because they cannot be gainfully employed at the minimum wage rate.

That was premature because the Labour Party surprisingly lost power in Western Australia in 2008 followed by the same result in Victoria 2010. Since that time the ALP lost office in NSW and Queensland, followed by the national defeat in 2013.

The (then) recent launch of The Howard Years has prompted some comparisons with Bob Menzies and his long term of office. Some people have suggested that Menzies had an easier task than Howard due to the more conservative tone of the times. Menzies did not have to go to the electorate after the “swinging sixties” in the new climate of sex, drugs and rock and roll.

The point of this article is that he did not have to face the backlash from one of his own policies that – the conscription of young people during the Vietnam War. The legislation was introduced during the Indonesia - Malaysian Confrontation (1963-1966) but it was not used on that occasion.

This paper argues that the Menzies Government left the Coalition an electoral poison pill when it resolved to send conscripts to the Vietnam war, unlike the WW2 when conscripts were kept close to home. I assert that conscription, more than the war itself, created a wave of protest and discontent which energised supporters of the ALP (and radical leftwing groups) and more significantly, diverted many voters and political activists from the conservative side of politics into long-term support for the ALP or other non-conservative parties. Even allowing for the other social changes that were happening at the time, it is likely that the conscription issue played a major role in tipping the electoral fortunes towards the ALP a couple of decades later.

The tipping effect took some time to fully emerge as more cohorts of voters came of age in the new climate created by the conscription issue and the new climate of public opinion that was increasingly dominated by members of the educated middle class who had moved to the left during the conscription debate.

In The End of Certainty (1992, 1994), Paul Kelly suggested that the “Vietnam quagmire” lost the conservatives a whole generation of politically-active young Australians.

"This was the generation which underwrote Labor's governance in the 1980s. Labor succeeded in the 1980s because it had better leaders, organizers and strategists. These resources grew from seedlings nourished for over twenty years."

Until the recent and unexpected ascent of the Liberals in Western Australia the ALP ruled in Canberra and in all the states and territories. The situation in mid-1965 was very different. Menzies had been the PM for as long as many people could remember and Liberals or allies under various names held power from coast to coast with the relatively minor exceptions of Tasmania and South Australia.

Apparently something very significant happened to the relative status of the major parties in the course of a generation. With the wisdom of hindsight a major cause of that fundamental shift in the balance of power can be traced to a blunder by the Menzies Government. This was the dispatch of conscripts to the Vietnam war.

Conscription

The policy was announced in late 1964 at the time of the confrontation between Malaya and Indonesia (1962-1966) and it commenced in 1965 to supplement voluntary recruitment to build up an adequate fighting force in case of emergencies. The Vietnam war then became the major field of action. Ballots recruited young men who turned 20 during the year and this aggravated many people because the conscripts had not reached the voting age of 21 at the time. Another grievance was the highly restrictive law on conscientious objection which demanded both religious grounds for objection and an objection to all wars. Unbelievers were excluded, as were men who may not have been pacifists but wanted to exercise the right to make a decision about just and unjust wars.

Paul Kelly referred to the “Vietnam quagmire” but he did not pinpoint conscription as a critical or even a particularly significant issue. This is most likely because the issue of the war and conscription were mostly fused into one without taking account of a nuanced position that addresses the two issues separately. The importance of keeping the two issues separate is that the Government would have been more credible if it had simply pursued the war and not sent conscripts. Reasonable arguments could be advanced to support the defence of the people in South Vietnam from a communist takeover but it was very difficult for anyone with a sense of moral and intellectual consistency to accept the use of conscription in a war that was supposed to be fought in defence of freedom.

Arguments

There are two main lines of argument to support my case on the pivotal importance of the conscription issue. The first is to make a comparison with the Korean war (1950-1953). The second is to note the kind of protestors who mobilised to resist conscription and the way that their political orientation and/or their level of involvement was permanently changed. In addition there are two secondary lines of argument. One is to respond to the obvious objection that everything was up in the air in the heady times of the swinging sixties and that alone would have created serious problems for political conservatives. The other addresses the fact that there was a worldwide surge of radicalism, notably involving Britain, France and Germany which were not involved in Vietnam, so it could be argued that this movement would have exerted influence in Australia regardless of conscription and the war.

Korea

I am not aware of any significant public unrest over the Korean War, although no doubt Communists and their fellow travellers would have objected. Compulsory military training was introduced (90 days full time and two years in the Citizen Military Forces) but there was no obligation for active service ( in stark contrast with the Vietnam situation).

At the time it would have been easy to ignore, discredit, and marginalise protestors, given the increased militancy of the Soviet Union as demonstrated by the blockade of Berlin in 1948 and related activities around the world. And in the normal course of events the management of anti-war protest should have become even easier when democratic sympathies were stirred after the brutal suppression of the Hungarians in 1956, and again after the re-run of Hungary in Prague in 1968. (But it has to be said, foreshadowing a later line of argument, that the course of events ceased to be normal after communism received a huge boost from the heavy-handed anti-communist initiative in the US, namely McCarthyism).

The history of the Vietnam War has been mostly written by those who regard the involvement of the allies as at best a mistake and at worst an immoral act of imperialism. [Writing in 2023, we now realist that the communist occupation of the south would result in the murder of countless business owners and landlords, as in China previously.] The majority of Australians had no strong feelings about the war, many were strongly in favour and most would have been content to live with it, as they had with the Korean War. Among those with memories of World War II, it was accepted without question that regular soldiers who volunteered to join the forces would fight when called upon to do so, and that some of them would die.

The big difference between Korea and Vietnam was conscription. This injected a life-or-death element into the situation of young men—and their families and friends—who had no desire to get involved in a distant conflict which represented no clear and distinct threat to Australia.

The New Protesters

The threat of conscription mobilised a completely different demographic of protesters from the old guard of communists. These including the Save Our Sons movement (1965–1973), Quakers and organised Humanists who tended to be articulate, well-connected, and respectable middle-class citizens who could not be marginalised like the communist-dominated trade unions and the fringe-dwellers of the radical left. For example Bridget Gilling, the impressively calm and dignififed President of the NSW Humanist Society was the Chair of the first NSW Moratorium. The Vietnam war and the conscription issue prompted Gordon Barton to form the Australia Party—forerunner of the Chipp Democrats—which provided a refuge for dissident Liberals who wanted to oppose conscription and/or the war but did not want to join the ALP. (To test the thesis of this paper it would be revealing to find how many of the Liberal activists and voters who shifted to the shortlived Australia Party returned to the Liberals, or moved on to the Democrats or the ALP).

Support for the government was seriously compromised by the way the issues of the war and the draft were conflated. In principle the two issues could have been separated and a credible position would have been to support the war and oppose conscription (as I argued in “Second Thoughts on Vietnam”, Quadrant, 1987). However the two issues were generally combined, to the great detriment of the case for involvement in the war. In addition, many people who were positive or open minded about the war the war but abominated the draft moved to the anti-war position as a result of friendships and associations formed in anti-conscription activities. So the conscription issue could have been the thin end of a wedge. Another wedge was the way the war was conducted. The first placard which I carried in Adelaide in 1968 read “Stop Bombing Hanoi”, a message that could easily be endorsed by a person who supported South Vietnam but objected to the bombing of civilians.

My thesis is that the end result was to move a significant proportion of the educated middle class, (especially the young), from a Coalition-supporting or politically-passive position to voting support or even active involvement with the ALP, or more radical positions. At the same time, with the expansion of the universities, the educated middle class was growing rapidly in numbers. It is possible that the events of the time did not drive significant changes in political alignment but raised the level of activity and commitment to anti-conservatism by people who were already inclined in that direction. This suggestion was put to me by a retired Liberal politician who considered that the mobilization factor, activating young ALP voters to become long-term workers for the ALP cause, was enough to account for the electoral success of the ALP in the 1980s. He accepted that the conscription issue was a major mobilizing factor, however I do not doubt that a considerable number of people shifted their party allegiance as well. This is implied in Paul Kelly’s statement that the conservatives “lost…a whole generation of politically active young Australians”. Losing the generation is a more damaging result than just energising a part of it, even allowing that the generation was not entirely “lost”. The numbers would be practically impossible to specify at this stage (tracking members of the Australia Party would help) but I am sure that ALP stalwarts were recruited among people who were not inclined by family background or temperament to anti-conservatism, and that conscription was the conservative pill that they would not swallow.

In addition it was immensely helpful that these revitalised recruits were active and articulate, and they moved into careers and other positions of power and influence, both in and out of politics, where their views could be most effectively implemented and propagated: in the media (especially the ABC), in the arts and other literary and cultural pursuits, in teaching of all kinds, in trade union organisations, in the increasingly politicised public service and in the regulative, human rights, ethnic affairs, affirmative action and grievance-related agencies that proliferated post-Whitlam.

The “Swinging Sixties” Factor

Many other changes were taking place during the 1960s and 1970s but it is not immediately apparent that they would have made much difference to the political allegiances of young people. On the left there was a slogan, “the personal is political” but this was the talk of dedicated “in your face” activists and most people surely made up their own mind about their personal activities without reference to politics. I don’t imagine that members of the Young Liberals were backward in coming forward to participate in sex, soft drugs and rock and roll, though not necessarily in ways that were deliberately calculated to confront and outrage their elders.

The raft of changes included growing affluence, sexual liberation, feminism, increased overseas travel, new trends in rock music, increased use of illicit drugs, the decline of traditional religious affiliation, increased access to university education and campus radicalism. Apart from the radicalisation of the humanities and soft social sciences on campus these changes appear to be politically neutral. Liberalism is a broad church; indeed it is more open to social change than the traditional working class and trade union base of the labour movement. That was apparent when traditional ALP voters revolted against Paul Keating when he decided to move on from economic reform to be an agent of social and cultural transformation.

Worldwide radicalism and anti-Americanism

My thesis is apparently undermined by the worldwide rise of radical activities in countries like Britain, France and West Germany where the Vietnam war was not a local issue. Apparently young radicals in those countries did not need to be mobilized by the war or by the threat of conscription, and so surely, it can be argued, there was bound to be a similar move in Australia. [Footnote, on a point of detail, it is interesting that some of the principal players in the highly newsworthy protests at the London School of Economics were draft dodgers from the US, so the war in a sense exported radicalism to Western Europe. It is also noteworthy that even though the worldwide radical movement was not sparked by the Vietnam war, the conflict became a potent image in the movement to represent the forces of capitalism and American “Cold War adventurism” at work.].

In reply, I suggest that it was not the radicals who did long-term damage to the Coalition parties, it was the “respectable protesters” like the middleclass ladies of Save Our Sons. Without the conscription issue the radicals could have been answered in debate and marginalised in the political process. Internal weakness and inconsistency in the conservative case created huge problems for Government supporters in the public debate, and in private conversations around the nation.

The beginning of this argument was the thesis that the conservative forces in Australia brought themselves undone by the inconsistency between their stated aims (to defend freedom) and the use of conscription. This thesis has wider application and it was illustrated by a previous episode in the United States. This was “McCarthyism”, a campaign in the early 1950s to expose communists, led by Senator Joe McCarthy. The problem was real because there were active communist agents of influence in the administration, in academia and elsewhere, including the arts and the film industry. However the methods employed by McCarthy and his helpers were so heavy handed, indiscriminate and insensitive that they produced a reaction in the form of “anti anti-communism”. This movement found fertile ground in intellectual circles where socialist and leftwing thinking were ingrained for many generations and it created a smokescreen, or a trojan horse, or people running “interference” (whatever image you like to use) for seriously subversive influences. The anti-communist forces became confused and divided, as the “old right” and other conservative groups split over the appropriate stance to simultaneously oppose communism and McCarthyism. The libertarian Murray Rothbard was a spectacular example of this process. He was a powerhouse of the three As (atheism, anarchism and Austrian economics) but for a period in the 1960s he aligned with the New Left because he felt that the non-left forces were irretrievably corrupted.

The point is that the radical forces around the world found their way made easy by a combination of leftwing dominance in intellectual circles, divisions on the non-left which resulted in half-hearted and fragmented efforts, and most important, by inconsistencies in non-left thinking which promoted self-destructive policies. In this perspective, the conscription issue in Australia represents a paradigm case of electoral self-destruction in the medium to long term.

What Happened to the Centre?

Things fall apart; the center cannot hold;

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world…

The best lack all conviction, while the worst

Are full of passionate intensity.

Yeats, “The Second Coming”

The success of the radical left after WW2 in maintaining a high profile and gathering recruits against the backdrop of real and overwhelming tyranny in the communist regimes of the world signals a problem on the “non-left”. In my view the problem was the near death of classical (non-socialist) liberalism.

An old saying goes “If you are not a socialist at 20, you have no heart. But if you are still a socialist at 40, you have no brains”. The beauty of the classical liberal creed is that it satisfies the needs of people with both warm hearts and active brains.

The four pillars of classical liberalism are (1) a suite of freedoms – speech, belief, movement, trade, association etc., (2) the rule of law, due process etc including protection of property rights, (3) limited government under the law and (4) a robust moral code including honesty, compassion, civility, community service, personal responsibility, enterprise.

These principles would underpin a vigorous commercial civilisation with an equally vigorous civic culture, supporting human rights without legalism and bureaucracy. Health, education and welfare could be provided by a mix of private and public services to maximise efficiency and minimise long-term dependency (in the case of welfare).

The four pillars support the pursuit of peace, freedom and prosperity. It is most likely that anywhere in the world where conditions are improving in a sustainable manner, one or more of the pillars are the active ingredients in the policy mix, which of course cannot be found anywhere in a pure form.

In the absence of a visible and clearly articulated “Radical Centre” of classical liberalism, the best that most moderate and reasonable people could find was some version of social democracy. This has the slogans to attract well-meaning and warm-hearted people who want the State to step in and fix up every problem under the sun. This has appeal as long as people understand little economics and no public choice theory to grasp the way interest groups rapidly capture the organs of Big Government and put in train the law of unintended consequences.

So Big Government intervention has achieved bipartisan support in most countries. Left-liberalism has morphed from the support of civil rights into a vehicle of savage intolerance with speech codes, no touching codes, no jumping into cold water to rescue drowning people codes etc.

Classical liberalism hardly had a profile in the 20th century. In Australia it was buried by the Australian Settlement over a hundred years ago which set in place trade protection, centralised wage fixing and the White Australia Policy. The British Liberals also turned to social democracy at the turn of the century. When classical liberalism was re-born as the New Right it attracted roughly equal incomprehension and abuse from both sides of politics. It has had a rough passage but it has a lot to offer.

In the context of this piece about conscription and the self-destructive tendencies of conservative parties, the point is that a party animated by classical liberalism would not fall into errors like conscription for a foreign war or the debacle of McCarthyism, or the lockdowns of recent memory (added in 2021.)

Conclusion

The conscription issue had a tsunami effect. With barely a ripple on the voting figures at the time, (actually the ascent of Gough Whitlam in 1972 was a rather substantial ripple) the conservative ships of state rode on to more election victories until the waves broke on the electoral shores during the 1980s and beyond. As Paul Kelly noted, the leading organisers and activists were recruited long before. It remains to be seen whether the Liberals can retrieve the lost ground and match Labor in recruiting leaders, organizers and activists who can win office in the years to come.

In the bigger picture of the battle of ideas (which will in the end prove decisive) it remains to be seen whether the carriers of classical liberalism can regain lost ground and propagate these robust and valuable ideas with the same degree of success that Fabians and other socialists have achieved up to date.

Postscript August 2011

If conscription or some other factors shifted the centre of gravity of Australian politics to the point where the ALP ruled practically from coast to coast for much of the time from 1983 to 2010, what accounts for the current situation where the party could be thrown out of office everywhere with the exception of Tasmania and maybe the Northern Territory? There has certainly not been a surge of classical liberalism in the electorate at large! This requires a substantial discussion which is not attempted here. Contributing factors would appear to be the major focus of ALP activists on winning elections rather than developing good policies, and, associated with that, the politicization of the public service to the detriment of good decision-making and planning in the middle and upper management. More work is required to explore this situation. It appears that the Coalition parties are not doing that work and it remains to be seen how much better they can do when they achieve office, especially at the State level.

Jacques Barzun (1907-2012) achieved a boost late in life when his massive and scholarly book Dawn to Decadence appeared in the year 2000 and quickly became a surprising best-seller.

His working life spanned the best part of three score years and ten from the 1930s to the turn of the millennium. He wrote, edited or translated over 40 books plus countless chapters, introductions, forewords, academic articles and pieces of high journalism for the educated public. A comprehensive bibliography including his early work when he wrote detective stories and book reviews under pseudonyms would be a major work in itself.

Barzun’s feel for the roots of twentieth century culture can be traced to his childhood in Paris where his parents conducted a modernist salon. His father worked in the Ministry of Labour but his heart was elsewhere. He wrote novels and poetry and hosted the likes of Guillaume Apollonaire who taught Jacques how to tell the time on his watch and Marie Laurencein who painted his portrait. Other regular visitors included the painters Marcel Duchamp and Albert Gleizes (a founder of cubism), the innovative composer Edgard Varese and foreigners such Ezra Pound, Richard Aldington and Stefan Zweig. Members of the older generation such as Andre Gide appeared occasionally to find out what the youngsters were up to.

During the war his father was called from the trenches for diplomatic missions and after a journey to America he offered Jacques the opportunity to complete his studies at Oxford, Cambridge or a leading American college. The young Barzun was reading about the red Indians so he opted for New York. He arrived young enough to become well embedded in the popular culture and later he wrote “Whoever wants to know the heart and mind of America had better learn baseball, the rules and realities of the game – and do it by watching first some high school or small town games” (Barzun 1954, 159).

In 1923 he entered Columbia College where among other activities he was president of the literary and debating clubs and drama critic for the Columbia Daily Spectator. He graduated at the top of his class and lectured at Columbia University where he became a full professor in 1945, Dean of the Graduate Faculties in 1955 and the inaugural Dean of Faculties and Provost of the University in 1958. This level of involvement in administration by a serious teacher and scholar has few parallels and it adds authority to his account of the travails of the universities.

Race Thinking and the Culture of Democracy

Barzun’s doctoral dissertation charted the protracted dispute in France over the “race” of the nobility versus the bourgeoisie which was one of the divisive factors which contributed to the French Revolution. He suggested that “race-thinking” persisted after the Revolution as an incendiary component of the struggles between nations, political parties, religious faiths and social groups. For Barzun “race-thinking” is used to justify collective hostility and it is most dangerous and powerful when it operates in partnership with other motives such as the nationalism of the Nazis, the socialism of the communists and nowadays the radicalism of Black Lives Matter. “Marxist doctrine at its purest is in form and effect racist thought. The class struggle is but the old race antagonism of French nobles and commoners write large and made ruthless. Marx’s bourgeois is not a human being with individual traits but a social abstraction, a creature devoid of virtue or free will and without the right to live.” (Barzun 1965, xi)

His book Race: A study of modern superstition was reprinted in 1965 and the Preface “Racism Today” makes interesting reading half a century later. He wrote “As long as people permit themselves to think of human groups without the vivid sense that groups consist of individuals and that individuals display the full range of human differences, the tendency which twenty-eight years ago I named ‘race-thinking’ will persist.” (ibid, ix)

Individuals should be treated according to their personal characteristics such as their fitness and qualifications for particular tasks and as long as the qualities required for the tasks are not race-related there is no need to make race an issue. If it is made an issue then “race-thinking” will continue to generate muddled thinking and inappropriate actions with potentially dangerous unintended consequences. He insisted that giving up race-thinking means equal opportunity but not affirmative action. Because there are no positive or negative traits that are race-related it follows that “sentimental or indignant reversals of the racist proposition are false and dangerous. The victims of oppression do not turn into angels by being emancipated… Race-thinking is bad thinking and that is all.” (ibid, xiv)

On the topic of affirmative action he wrote “When injustice is redressed, the hitherto outcast and maligned group must not benefit in reverse from the racism they justly complained of. They do not suddenly possess, as a group, the virtues they were previously denied, and it is no sign of wisdom in the former oppressors to affect a contrite preference for those they once abused.” (ibid, xv)

He recalled a report from a Fullbright scholar in Paris who witnessed a memorable celebration in the Latin Quarter. A contingent of white writers and artists led by Negro writers and accompanied by French and American students ceremonially burned the white race in effigy! He regarded that as an emblem of suicide by both parties because inverting the racial hierarchy leaves race-thinking intact and probably even stronger than before because it is sanctified by the self-righteous sense of correcting a great injustice.

Barzun went on to address the repeated attempts to have The Merchant of Venice banned and Huckleberry Finn removed from library shelves. “This anxious wrangling which goes on about books and plays seems at times trivial but it is in fact fundamental. If democratic culture yields on this point no prospect lies ahead but that of increased animosity among pressure groups…In social and cultural relations the law rarely intervenes effectively; the protection of rights and feelings only comes from decency and self-restraint.” (ibid, xvi my italics)

The Pursuit of Social Progress and The secularisation of Christian moral fervor

In a wide-raging commentary on American civilization in God’s Country and Mine (1954) Barzun commented on the mounting impatience of social reformers and he posed the question “We may ask when and where the world has seen a whole nation developing the habit, the tendency, of continually looking out for those who in one way or another are left out…Yet look at the subjects of unceasing agitation in our daily press: the rights of labour in bargaining, the fight for fair employment practices, for socialized medicine, against discrimination in Army and Navy, in colleges and hospitals, in restaurants and places of public entertainment; in a word, the abolition of irrational privilege”. (Barzun 1954, 12-13).

He had encountered one of the consequences of the phenomenon which Paul Craig Roberts later described as a “land mine” at the very basis of Western thought. “The 18th century Enlightenment had two results that combined to produce a destructive formula. On the one hand, Christian moral fervor was secularised, which produced demands for the moral perfectibility of society. On the other hand, modern science called into question the reality of moral motives.” (Roberts 1991). These tendencies might appear to be contradictory but they have not balanced each other. The first drives demands for the immediate and comprehensive rectification of all the forms of injustice and inequality which are attributed to our traditional mores and the institutions of democratic capitalism. The other undermines any defence that might be offered for those mores and institutions. The result is an explosive mixture of moral indignation and moral relativism or scepticism.

Barzun continued “We should not be misled by the clamour and the wailing. It is our success that has caused it.” (Barzun 1954, 17) An example of success was the marked narrowing of the differential between white and Afro American wages through the 1940s and the 1950s, before legislation for affirmative action. But a degree of success was not enough for the coercive utopians and they discovered the power of discovering social crises, even if the situation was improving, such as teenage pregnancy, poverty and the murder rate in the 1950s (Sowell 1988).

Sowell's international study of affirmative action described the gap between the rhetoric and the reality of preference policies and the pattern of events which he found around the world. Generally the demand for preferential policies came from well educated, 'new class' members of supposedly disadvantaged groups. The same people also become the main beneficiaries of preference policies which tend to further disadvantage the majority of their bretheren. This was demonstrated in Malaysia where the gap between rich and poor Malays widened in the wake of preference policies for ethnic Malays (Sowell 1990, 49). An academic advocate for preference policies conceded the fact but suggested that the poor Malays prefer to be exploited by their own kind!

Culture and Freedom

After his work on race Barzun turned to the cultural roots of democracy. On Human Freedom (1939) addressed the temper and tone of mind that is required to achieve peace, prosperity and especially freedom while moderating the obsession with politics. “Salvation by Political Action” has been described as one of the great myths of the 20^th century because it has led people to expect too much from politics and to the politicisation of everything under the sun (the personal is political). Further, the idea of salvation by revolutionary political action often results in obsession with ends regardless of means to legitimate monstrous crimes for the “greater good” in future.

His next major works were Darwin, Marx and Wagner: Critique of a Heritage (1941) and Romanticism and the Modern Ego (1943.) The nomination of Wagner rather than Freud in the trinity of emblematic modern minds is a sign of Barzun's profound interest in music and the arts. He argued that these men achieved their reputations by catching the spirit of the age, like surfers on a wave, backed by the formidable public relations exercises mounted by their followers. This earned them the status of intellectual icons despite their lack of originality and the significant flaws in their systems. He described in some detail how all the leading ideas of evolutionary theory, socialism and the leading role of the artist were commonplace for decades before the big three started work.

In addition to the shortcomings of their systems, two of the three titans were monstrously egocentric and unprincipled exploiters of their friends and denigrators of their enemies. These personal characteristics became prominent in the modus operandi of their followers.

Education and the “house of intellect”

In 1943-44 Barzun spent his sabbatical leave on a study tour to “take the temperature” of education across the nation. “Under every meridian on this continent I have been privileged to attend meetings of the curriculum committee which was, it seemed, sitting continuously from coast to coast; and I had learned enough about finance, faculty clubs and state and campus politics to equip a dozen administrators” (Barzun 1981, xxv). The result was Teacher in America, first published in 1945 and reprinted in 1981, a tour de force of the challenges and difficulties in the education system such as the notion that learning has to be “fun”, various misguided fads promoted in Teacher Training Schools and the soul-destroying drudgery of the PhD “octopus”.

The Preface of the 1981 edition is a mournful reflection on several decades of regression in the public education system, much of it driven by the graduates of the courses in Education which he deplored in the first edition. “Thirty-five years have passed, true; but the normal drift of things will not account for the great chasm. The once proud and efficient public-school system of the United States, especially its unique free high school for all—has turned into a wasteland where violence and vice share the time with ignorance and idleness, besides serving as battleground for vested interests, social, political, and economic.” (Barzun 1981, ix). He described the decline as “heartbreakingly sad” and he suggested that this occurred with the very best intentions to expand the scope of the schools with a wave of additional responsibilities and progressive innovations to promote personal development, citizenship and sociability.

Good teachers are cramped or stymied in their efforts, while the public pays more and more for less and less. The failure to be sober in action and purpose; to do well what can actually be done, has turned a scene of fruitful activity into a spectacle of defeat, shame, and despair.

The new product of that debased system, the functional illiterate, is numbered in millions, while various forms of deceit have become accented as inevitable—”social promotion” or for those who fail the “minimum competency” test; and most lately, “bilingual education,” by which the rudiments are supposedly taught in over ninety languages other than English. The old plan and purpose of teaching the young what they truly need to know survives only in the private sector, itself hard-pressed and shrinking in size. (ibid, x)

His comments on the universities were equally pungent, informed by his heavy involvement in administration at the highest level and the material which he collected for The American University (1968) which is treated below.

In The House of Intellect (1959) he explored the influences that distract so many intelligent and educated people from clear, direct and analytical thinking. He pointed out that intellectuals themselves have been the major agents in the erosion of the life of the mind along with the influence of distorted views of Science, and the unhelpful contribution of Business inspired by misplaced Philanthropy.

Barzun paid attention to the mostly informal “house rules” which influence the way we organize ourselves for learning and scholarship and the way we exchange ideas and opinions in conversation. Addressing the craft of intellectual work he wrote On Writing, Editing and Publishing (1971), Simple and Direct: A Rhetoric for Writers (1975) and The Modern Researcher (2003). He explained that he was talking about the cultivation of “intellect” rather than intelligence or creativity because little can be done about the supply of native talent but a great deal can be done to maximise the productivity of our intellectual efforts. This calls for appropriate habits and disciplines ranging from effective note-taking in the lecture theatre and the library to efficient management of citations and references when writing for publication.

Among the house rules are the rituals of conversation in all its various modes from the encounter at the elevator or the bus stop to the dinner table, the cocktail party and the academic conference. Barzun referred to Tocqueville’s remarks on the lack of freedom in American democracy which Toqueville attributed to pervasive pressure for conformity which he encountered in the 19^th century (Barzun 1939, 34). This pressure undermines the capacity for civil disagreement on controversial matters.

Barzun deplored the awkwardness which he saw emerging in social contexts when there was a threat of “highbrow” talk or mention of “hot” topics. One of the consequences is the family tradition of “no religion or politics at the dining table”. Barzun wrote before the modern times when formal house rules on conversation have appeared in the form of laws and codes related to “hate speech”, trigger warnings and the demand for safe spaces where only approved ideas may be expressed. Unlike the kind of practices and procedures which Barzun advocated to free up the flow of conversation and facilitate the nuanced consideration of divisive issues these rules are designed to avoid issues and restrict free speech.

In Science: The Glorious Entertainment (1963), Barzun catalogued and criticised many conflicting and incoherent perceptions of science that are abroad in the land, some of them exerting a malicious influence on the humanities and many of them either trivialising or sensationalising the activities of scientists. In this book be built on the case that he sketched previously in the first 1945 edition of Teacher in America ”If science students leave college thinking, as they usually do, that science offers a full, accurate, and literal description of man and Nature…if they think theories spring from facts and that scientific authority at any time is infallible… and if they think that science steadily and automatically makes for a better world – then they have wasted their time in the science lecture room and they are a plain menace to the society they live in” (Barzun 1981, 129-30).

In 1968 he published his account of the tendencies in American higher education as the rapid postwar expansion of universities and colleges strained to breaking point the traditions and disciplines which nurture learning and scholarship. As if to underline his concerns The American University appeared in the year that students around the world started setting fire to their campuses, including his own. He considered that the distraction of the Vietnam war and the threat of the draft were the last straws added to a raft of legitimate student grievances regarding the erosion of teaching by academics whose loyalties were progressively drawn away from the students and the faculty.

He described the “flight from teaching” which started during the New Deal when the administration began to recruit academics in numbers. At first the rotations were short term but that condition was relaxed during the war. After the war the universities and colleges expanded rapidly and at the same time they took on a growing list of “social responsibilities” aided by the foundation funding described above. This lured staff into “exciting and relevant” work outside the classrooms. “With a dispersed, revolving faculty, the institution ceased to have a recognizable individual face…the university lost its wholeness (not to say its integrity) and prepared the way for its own debacle in 1965—68.” (Barzun 1981 xii)

Further waves of government regulation and supervision in favor of women and minorities drove the colleges and universities to employ additional regiments of administrators and the days are beyond living memory when a university could be run by a Bursar and a handful of clerical staff while the faculties looked after themselves.

The mushrooming growth of the sector recruited many young people with no family tradition of higher education and too many found that their mentors regarded teaching as a disagreeable chore. Too many of the faculty were absent on foundation-funded excursions to address “problems of Appalachian poverty or Venezuelan finance”. Scholarship like any other craft is best learned by an apprentice working at the elbow of the master but with ballooning class sizes there were nowhere near enough scholarly elbows to go around, even at the postgraduate level. The Great Books program which Barzun and Lionel Trilling conducted at Columbia was an outstanding exception where two scholars of international stature worked through the books one by one in small face to face seminars.

Credentialing was becoming an issue for more occupations and professions. As degrees became common additional degrees and especially doctorates became the new minimal requirement for academics and researchers. “For most students…the shift has been from study to qualifying – a new form of initiation congenial equally to the university and to the world, for the world has allowed itself to be academized in all but its manual work” (ibid, 229). With that pressure bearing upon them students were not impressed when teachers took leave in mid-semester or left the campus entirely for a better offer elsewhere, missed office hours and generally showed their lack of interest in the chores of teaching. “These last two objects of resentment [Vietnam and the draft] were bound to fill the student mind when their mentors were so loudly diagnosing and dosing the ills of society.”

“As for the hatred of high bourgeois culture, it was communicated by nearly every contemporary novel, play, painting, or artist’s biography that found a place in the popular part of the curriculum. So the age was past when ‘freshman year’ in a good college came as a revelation of wonders undreamed of, as the first mature interplay of minds.” (Barzun 1981, xiv)

And so the unresisted protestors took over the campuses, set fires, convened angry meetings and occupied building. Some years later Alan Bloom in The Closing of the American Mind documented some of the chaos at Cornell where he was an eyewitness to disgraceful episodes as agitators introduced firearms to the campus, intimidated staff and mobilized the race card as an additional combustible in the mix. Strangely he did not refer to Barzun’s earlier studies.

Music and the Arts

Barzun’s first wife was a violinist and his passion for music is apparent throughout his work. Volumes specifically devoted to music include the magisterial two-volume biography Berlioz and the Romantic Century (1950), Sidelights on Opera at Glimmerglass (2001) and two collections which he compiled - Pleasures of Music: a Reader's Choice of Great Writing About Music and Musicians From Cellini to Bernard Shaw (1951) and Music in American Life (1956). His Berlioz book ran to several editions and also appeared in a condensed form for popular consumption. A chapter in Teacher in America contemplated the balancing act required to introduce both performance and appreciation of music and the other arts, especially for students who come without a broad exposure to music at home.

Another arm of Barzun’s cultural project was to sort out the positive and negative elements in modern art. He had a head start with his early exposure to some of the practitioners before 1914 and his positive statement is in a collection of papers titled The Energies of Art (1956). This is a defence of certain types of revolutionary practices with genuine artistic merits which were not fully appreciated due to the distraction created by others who set out to deliberately affront the sensibilities of the general public as if this established a prima facie case for significance and originality. He claimed that the generation of artists who were in their prime during the period 1900 to 1914 were laying the foundations for major advances in art, transcending the schools of classicism, romanticism, naturalism and symbolism that held the stage during the previous two centuries.

There was this new surge of creation, inventiveness, new techniques, which gave promise that the 20th century would be one of the great productive periods of Western culture. It all collapsed into the tensions of the First World War. There were hundreds of thousands of gifted people killed. They were part of a break; they made a chasm. The generation that came to literary and other activities in the Twenties were very young men who did not have their elders' guidance and lacked a sense of resistance to their elders, both of which are necessary to true literary creation. (Gathman 2010)

Instead of consolidating the pre-1914 advances he argued that the arts suffered from a number of debilitating ideas which he catalogued in The Use and Abuse of Art (1974). He examined the rise of art as a substitute for religion in the nineteenth century so art simultaneously became the "ultimate critic of life and the moral censor of society". The next phase in that development was Estheticism and Abolitionism during the period 1890 to 1914 when “the tradition of the New” turned artists against past art as a point of reference for any moral or aesthetic standards. "By making extreme moral and esthetic demands in the harsh way of shock and insult, art unsettles the self and destroys confidence and spontaneity in individual conduct." (Barzun 1974, 73).This has helped to undermine the assumptions that the state and civilized society are valuable or admirable, thus impairing the effectiveness of political and social institutions and proving the destroyers' own case. By linking the growing interest and respect for art in modern times with the “dominance of bourgeoise values” Art turned on art itself by becoming a vehicle for every kind of assault on traditional standards of beauty, morality and commonsense.

That was written forty years ago and since then increasing numbers of students have been exposed to even more advanced "theory" to justify the assault of Art on our senses and sensibilities. In the fourth lecture he moved on to another piece in the crazy pavement of modern art, the function of art as redeemer, linked with the concept of art as a substitute for religion. Barzun accepted the common ground, that the power exerted by great art on receptive persons is a religious power, and he pursued the consequences that can follow when that kind of influence is not checked by critical thinking and a sense of history. Finally he discussed the individual and collective forms of salvation through Art that have been promulgated for 200 years. By “collective salvation” he meant the appeal of revolutionary art which offers the artist a special role, first as evangelist and later as beneficiary, in the utopian society brought about by the revolution.

His legacy

As Barzun passed his centenary he could look back on a body of scholarly work and commentary which few people could equal but he must have been disenchanted by the widespread neglect of his efforts. He had many admirers but there did not appear to be anything like a Barzun circle or school to systematically perpetuate his ideas and his influence. This is apparent in the collection of papers in his honour, From Parnassus (1976) which is disappointing in the very ordinary quality of the contributions. Moreover the biographical piece by Lionel Trilling is practically useless because the author fell ill and died leaving little more than rough notes. This is most unfortunate because Trilling, as a longtime colleague and friend off campus, might have shed some light on little-known aspects of his life such as the unbuttoned man in his domestic setting, and some insights into the demons and aspirations which drove him to read and write so much.

REFERENCES

Barzun, Jacques. 1937. Revised 1965. Race: a Study in Modern Superstition. New York: Harper & Row.

Barzun, Jacques. 1939. Of Human Freedom. Boston: Little, Brown and Company.

Barzun, Jacques. 1941. Darwin, Marx, Wagner: Critique of a Heritage. London: Secker & Warburg.

Barzun, Jacques. 1943. Romanticism and the Modern Ego. Boston: Little, Brown and Company.

Barzun, Jacques. 1945. Reprinted 1981. Teacher in America. Indianapolis: Liberty Fund. The 1981 Preface http://www.the-rathouse.com/JacquesBarzunPreface.html

Barzun, Jacques. 1950. Berlioz and the Romantic Century. Boston: Little, Brown and Company.

Barzun, Jacques. 1951. Pleasures of Music: A Reader's Choice of Great Writing About Music and Musicians From Cellini to Bernard Shaw. New York: Viking Press.

Barzun, Jacques. 1954. God's Country and Mine: A Declaration of Love, Spiced with a Few Harsh Words. Boston: Little, Brown and Company.

Barzun, Jacques. 1956. Music in American Life. Blooomington: Indiana University Press.

Barzun, Jacques. 1956. The Energies of Art: Studies of Authors, Classic and Modern. New York: Harper & Brothers.

Barzun, J. 1959. The House of Intellect. New York: Harper & Brothers.

Barzun, Jacques. 1964. Science: The Glorious Entertainment. London: Secker & Warburg.

Barzun, Jacques. 1968. Reprinted 1993. The American University: How It Runs, Where It Is Going. Chicago: University Of Chicago Press.

Barzun, Jacques. 1971. On Writing, Editing, and Publishing. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Barzun, Jacques. 1974. The Use and Abuse of Art. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press.

Barzun, Jacques. 1975. Simple and Direct: A Rhetoric for Writers. New York: Harper & Row.

Barzun, Jacques. 2000. From Dawn to Decadence: 500 Years of Western Cultural Life, 1500 to the Present. Boston: Harper.

Bloom, Allan. 1987. The Closing of the American Mind: How higher education has failed democracy and impoverished the souls of today’s students. New York: Penguin.

Gathman, Roger. 2000. The Man Who Knew Too Much: Jacques Barzun, Idea Man, The Austin Chronicle, Friday October 13. https://www.austinchronicle.com/books/2000-10-13/78886/

Kimball, Roger. 2000. Barzun on the West. The New Criterion 18(10) June: 5-11.

Sowell Thomas.1988. Endangered Freedoms. CIS Occasional Papers 22. The Fourth John Bonython Lecture. Sydney: Centre for Independent Studies.

Sowell, Thomas. 1990. Preferential Policies: An International Perspective. New York: William Morrow and Company.

These lines from an early poem convey an unsentimental sense of place and provide a hint of his lingering need for spiritual consolation which he eventually discovered in the church.

And I am fitted to that land as the soul is to the body,

I know its contradictions, waste, and sprawling indolence;

They are in me and its triumphs are my own,

Hard-won in the thin and bitter years without pretence.

MaAuley, with the American poet Yvor Winters and Jacques Barzun, featured in the first of the Revivalist Series in the legendary Rathouse website.

The revivalist series gives credit to important thinkers who are forgotten, misunderstood or underrated. Others are the psychologist Liam Hudson, the hippie conservative Barry Humphries, the psychologist and linguist Karl Buhler, the literary scholar Rene Wellek, the economists Peter Bauer and William Harold Hutt, and the revolutionary, reforming psychoanalyst Ian D Suttie.

This is the introductory page

http://www.the-rathouse.com/Revivalist.html

The McAuley section

http://www.the-rathouse.com/JamesMcAuley.html

CONTENTS

Biographical overview.

Two reviews of a hatchet job written by Cassandra Pybus on a $100,000 literary grant. I want my money back!

Peter Coleman on the launch of Quadrant and the selection of the editor.

Geoffrey Lehman on McAuley’s poetry.

Peter Coleman on McAuley’s spiritual and intellectual journey, from bohemian to conservatism. At the time, hippy or bohemian conservatism had not been invented although Brian Penton and Barry Humphies are early specimens.

A biographical fragment.

College science teaching in the junior colleges goes on to swell the ranks of the two great classes of modern men, the single track expert and the scientific ignoramus. This makes us think about the place of science teaching in a general education.

Fortunately there is no doubt whatever about the place of the sciences: they are humanities and they belong in the college curriculum. Accordingly, they should be introduced into it as humanities, at the earliest possible moment. How? I have some tentative suggestions to make, but first I want to stress the urgent need to do better.

The worst danger of science teaching in the way it is being done at present is the creation of a large, powerful, and complacent class of college-trained uneducated men at the very heart of our industrial and political system. Possibly one of the conditions that enabled the collapse of democracy in Germany during the 1930s was the split among three groups: the technicians, the citizens, and the irresponsible rabble. This is clear if you consider the professional army caste as a group of unthinking technicians. The rabble, together with the technicians can cow the citizenry because the technicians - wedded solely to their workbench - will work for any group that hires. In the modern context translate technicians as scientists. And the mass of people – the citizens - are trained to accept the authority of experts.

Such principles will hardly give long life and happiness to a democracy. The only hope for a democratic state is to have more citizens than rabble and technicians/scientists. Hence technicians must be educated to become conscious, responsible, politically and morally active people. Otherwise they will become paid slaves in the service of some rabble, high or low.

Meanwhile our present stock of citizens must not simply gape at the wonders of science, but must understand enough of its principles to criticize and value the results.

Returning to the change of direction in science teaching, we must recognize that most students will not make science their profession. The compulsory science units for future lay citizens must be explicitly designed for them. Such a course must not play at making physicists or biologists, but must explain the principles of the physical sciences in a coherent manner.

A "survey" of all the sciences is out of the question. It would be at once superficial and be­ wildering. But an intelligent introduction to principles can be given. The assumptions that connect and that differentiate the sciences of (1) matter, (2) of living beings, and (3) of logical relation can be taught; the meaning and the grounds of great unifying theories can be explained, and significant demonstrations and experiments can be shown to and made by the students.

Out of such a course there would surely come a changed attitude on the part of teachers and indeed a change in teaching personnel. At present, side by side with wise men and ripe teachers in the sciences, one finds many highly trained and absolutely uneducated practitioners.

Many university scientists openly scorn teaching and use their appointment to boil the pot of individual research. Now a life of research is a worthy one, but no amount of worthy motive justifies false pretenses and fraudulent impersonation-in this case the pretense of imparting knowledge and the impersonation of a teacher.

All this clearly depends on teaching our easygoing, rather credulous college boys and girls what science is. If they leave college thinking, as they usually do, that science offers a full, accurate, and literal description of man and Nature; if they think scientific research by itself yields final answers to social problems; if they think scientists are the only honest, patient, and careful workers in the world and if they think that science steadily and automatically makes for a better world - then they have wasted their time in the science lecture room

The time has now come for the three-cornered duel on the campus to cease. The classics, philosophy and science are at once overlapping and complementary disciplines. Science must be taught, and historically, too, or the people will perish. Philosophy likewise must have a voice in all courses throwing light on the history of ideas. It will save philosophy as a subject and save the students from narrowmindedness. But philosophy has other obvious collegiate duties. It must read its great masterpieces with the new generation, expound ethical and metaphysical theory, help teach logic, and do liaison work with historians, scientists, and theologians.

The classics, too, must enter the dance. They hold the key to the meaning of our long journey from the cave to the laboratory.