Why are so many intellectuals collectivists?
Milton Friedman’s answer to the question, circa 1972:
I think it’s in their own self-interest, in a double way. First, in a collectivist society, intellectuals have more power than they do in a free enterprise system. In the 1930s, the New Deal created an enormous number of jobs that didn’t exist before for intellectuals. I had one myself, so I am speaking from personal experience. There has been a “drang nach Washington” since the New Deal which intellectuals everywhere recognize as having improved their personal status. Second, it is much easier to sell simple-minded, collectivist ideas than it is to sell sophisticated, free enterprise ideas.
Thomas Sowell wrote an entire book on the same basic topic approximately forty years later. I have only read a small portion of it, but I recommend just about everything Sowell ever wrote.
“Drang nach Washington” is a fun phrase. Clearly it comes from “Drang nach osten”:
Drang nach Osten (German: “Drive to the East”, “push eastward”, “drive toward the East” or “desire to push East”) was a term coined in the 19th century to designate German expansion into Slavic lands. The term became a motto of the German nationalist movement in the late 19th century.
I’d tend to demur about Friedman’s explanation. As has been noted by Allan Bloom and others, academic humanists are liberals by default, but they’re useless as policy wonks. At the same time, the discipline most useful is economics. As recently as 30 years ago, non-liberals were common and perhaps modal among economists and there’s still a place for non-liberals in economics departments (at a time when they hardly exist in sociology, anthropology, geography, social psychology, and American history). Business school faculties still have a large corps of Republicans.
Thomas Sowell is a national treasure!
The comfortable luxury of the ivory towers, patronage from individuals and factions seeking to establish monopolies and practices, and others who spin balls of yarns for social progress.
Sowell’s Intellectuals and Society is one of five most influential books in my own ‘walking away”. It validated my own disagreements with intellectuals from whom I had been seeking insights. Sowell introduced the term “social vision”, which can include religion, political ideology, neighborhood common sense, as well as family beliefs. So now, when I debate or observe someone with whom I have strong disagreement over a current issue, I realize that we interpret events and evaluate ideas on how they fit into our “social visions”. And, ideologues create narratives that conform to an unstated social vision. Now, I recall George Orwell’s, “There are some ideas so absurd that only an intellectual could believe them.”
“Second, it is much easier to sell simple-minded, collectivist ideas than it is to sell sophisticated, free enterprise ideas.” I have been thinking this on my own, but Friedman beat me to it by 25 years. For my change, it took paying careful attention in economic classes and eventually getting an MBA that led me to seeing how good-sounding collectivist ideas are, in practice, counter productive. And, understanding markets explains why top-down control does not work.
Goodness. The answer to this question is far easier and obvious than your responders suggest: Academe is collectivist because, back in the 1950s, or earlier, the collectivists collected themselves into a union-like collectivity with the aim of promoting other collectivists into tenured positions. They were wildly successful. Now, at least in the humanities, a non-collectivist can’t get a job.
The academy is a collectivist cartel at this point.
kr:
It’s been going on much longer than that.
People who think they are smart, think they are smarter than most people and therefore they should be making smart decisions for people … for the people’s own good of course.
That plan works best in a collective situation.
Some years back I ran across this Woodrow Wilson quote from a 1912 campaign speech in “The Practical Cogitator,” a book of quotes:
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What is liberty?
I have long had an image in my mind of what constitutes liberty. Suppose that I were building a great piece of powerful machinery, and suppose that I should so awkwardly and unskilfully assemble the parts of it that every time one part tried to move it would be interfered with by the others, and the whole thing would buckle up and be checked. Liberty for the several parts would consist in the best possible assembling and adjustment of them all, would it not? If you want the great piston of the engine to run with absolute freedom, give it absolutely perfect alignment and adjustment with the other parts of the machine, so that it is free, not because it is let alone or isolated, but because it has been associated most skilfully and carefully with the other parts of the great structure.
What is liberty? You say of the locomotive that it runs free. What do you mean? You mean that its parts are so assembled and adjusted that friction is reduced to a minimum, and that it has perfect adjustment. We say of a boat skimming the water with light foot, “How free she runs,” when we mean, how perfectly she is adjusted to the force of the wind, how perfectly she obeys the great breath out of the heavens that fills her sails. Throw her head up into the wind and see how she will halt and stagger, how every sheet will shiver and her whole frame be shaken, how instantly she is “in irons,” in the expressive phrase of the sea. She is free only when you have let her fall off again and have recovered once more her nice adjustment to the forces she must obey and cannot defy.
Human freedom consists in perfect adjustments of human interests and human activities and human energies.
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What Wilson says about Liberty sounds grand until one realizes that it reduces human beings to mechanical parts in a machine. Therein lies, somehow, liberty.
And that vast intelligence in charge of designing and controlling the machinery? Wilson, and people like him, of course.
Chilling. Years later Orwell summed up Wilson’s sentiment in three words: “Freedom is slavery.”
I’ll stick with the obvious — freedom is freedom.
The British historian, Paul Johnson, wrote a book about this 20 years ago called “Intellectuals”. It profiles individuals like Rousseau, Marx and Sartre and examines what gave them the “credentials” to give advice to us on how to conduct our affairs. Very Interesting.
From Eric Hoffer’s The Temper of Our Times (1967):
“The attitude of the intellectual community toward America is shaped not by the creative few but by the many who for one reason or another cannot transmute their dissatisfaction into a creative impulse, and cannot acquire a sense of uniqueness and of growth by developing and expressing their capacities and talents. There is nothing in contemporary America that can cure or alleviate their chronic frustration. They want power, lordship, and opportunities for imposing action. Even if we should banish poverty from the land, lift up the Negro to true equality, withdraw from Vietnam, and give half of the national income as foreign aid, they will still see America as an air-conditioned nightmare unfit for them to live in.”
“The ratio between supervisory and producing personnel is always highest where the intellectuals are in power. In a Communist country it takes half the population to supervise the other half.”
I think Hoffer’s thesis is a better fit than Friedman’s.
The Hoffer quote is interesting, but the Friedman quote begins with,
“First, in a collectivist society, intellectuals have more power than they do in a free enterprise system.”
This is much more expansive. Hoffer’s intellectuals are contained within it, but so are many intelligent and creative intellectuals who maybe even live conservative lives but vote for collectivists. Because like W. Wilson’s concept, they believe that when all the intellectuals have the power to engineer the great machine of society properly, it will run free.
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I thought I’d recommend reading Friedman himself, specifically “Free to Choose.” It’s very accessible (simple?) and was written after he and his wife did a TV series by the same name.
It contains the gem, “the four categories spending.”
1) Money you earn and spend on yourself. (The best type.)
2) Money you earn and give to someone else, that they then spend on themselves.
3) Money you earn and you spend on behalf of someone else. (i.e. a gift)
4) Money you earn, give to a 2nd party who then spends it on behalf of a 3rd party. (The worst type. For example, most government spending.)
Because they use a variation of Lucifer’s energy and philosophy.
In 1977 Stewart Brand of “Whole Earth Catalog” fame arranged a lecture by Hermann Kahn, the futurist who wrote “Thinking About The Unthinkable,” for Jerry Brown et al. at the CA governor’s office. It was surprisingly prescient.
“A war of the New Class against the middle class — when you look at American politics that way, everything falls into place.”
Kahn specifies the New Class:
Think of a group of people who come from upper middle class backgrounds, from families who are largely education-oriented, so they see that the children go to the good schools and who, after they get out of the schools, earn their living by the use of academic skills, language skills, aesthetic skills, analytical skills. They don’t earn their living by being entrepreneurs, businessmen, engineers, laborers, clerical workers.
This group preserves the division in American history which goes back about 150 years. The basic reigning doctrine of the New Class first emerged in the mid- 1870’s, the Transcendentalists — Emerson, Thoreau, people like that. If you read them today, a remarkably high percent of their writing reads like it was written by Marcuse.
This is an increasing class in the United States. They came into power with the Kennedy administration, in the early ’60’s. They went sort of crazy in the mid-’60’s, and this brings me to the second book I’m writing: 1965-1975, A Decade of Social Malaise and Educated Incapacity.
Let me take the second term first. It comes from Thorstein Veblen, who used the term “trained incapacity” — by which he meant many things, among which was an inability of engineers and sociologists to deal with simple issues which they could have dealt with if they had not had graduate training. Is the concept clear?
“Educated incapacity” is a much more pervasive kind of thing, where your whole educational outlook, starting with your upbringing, childhood, everything, makes it almost impossible for you to deal with most of the obvious points of American social life today.
Kahn forecast the conflict we see today between the Washington insiders and the Tea Party and now the Trump movement. A pity Jerry Brown took little of Kahn’s lecture to heart.
TommyJay, I’m going to suggest Death of a Salesman as an example of the intellectual’s treatment of commercial and industrial society. I was compelled to read it nearly 40 years ago by an English teacher who bought into it’s theses. He also assigned Spoon River Anthology. We were spared Babbitt and Winesburg, Ohio. Biographers of Arthur Miller have advanced the thesis that the motor of Death of a Salesman was Miller’s contempt for and resentment of his uncle. A collectivist society doesn’t accord a character like Arthur Miller any more power over his world than he had in 1949. What it does do is harass people like Arthur Miller’s uncle in various ways and reduce their status and self-respect. Which was also Arthur Miller’s object.