Alan Charles Kors

CAN THERE BE AN “AFTER SOCIALISM”?

There is no “after socialism.” There will not be in our or in our childrens lifetimes an “after socialism.” In the wake of the Holocaust and the ruins of Nazism, anti-Semitism lay low a bit, embarrassed by its worst manifestation, its actual exercise of state dominion. In the wake of the collapse of Communism, socialisms only real and full experience of power, socialism too lays low for just a moment. Socialisms causes in the West, however, remain ever with us, the product of the convergence of two extraordinary achievements: liberal free enterprise and political democracy. The former creates wealth that has transformed all human possibility, but it also gives rise to particularly deep envy. The latter allows ambition a route to power by an appeal to the democratic state to seize and redistribute wealth in the name of social equality. As Friedrich Hayek and Ludwig von Mises understood perfectly, the bounty of free enterprise leads the unproductive to believe that such wealth is a fact of nature, there for the taking.

An Uneasy Relationship: Atheism and Scepticism in the Late French Enlightenment

At first glance, the materialistic atheism of the late French Enlightenment appears philosophically dogmatic and wholly incompatible with philosophical scepticism. A closer examination of the works of Denis Diderot, the baron d’Holbach, and Jacques-Andre Naigeon, however, reveals that at their seemingly most dogmatic moments, they reflected significantly on “the weakness of the human mind” in ways that had important sceptical consequences. More importantly, when they examined the status of their own propositions, they concluded on behalf both of the impossibility of philosophical demonstration of their own foundational assumptions and of the impossibility of changing, in the ways they would have desired, the thinking and the behavior of the human species.

Calumny, Culture, Continuity, and Control

Charles Waltons deeply researched work is an extended effort to understand why, after the overthrow of the royal system of press censorship, the French Revolution came to substitute the crime of lèse-majesté for the crime of lèse-nation. Walton is convincing in his argument for seeing profound continuities in French cultures concern with calumny, honor, and the regulation of public morals and expression. He also demonstrates well that the Revolutions rejection of prior restraint in publication did not mean an end to vigorous policing of expression post-publication, His treatment of Old Regime notions of calumny, however, conflates the aristocracys profound concern with calumny against honor, above all else, and—the definition of calumny that he prefers—the false accusation of an actual crime. Further, when aristocratic honor disappeared legally from the equation—a genuine cultural discontinuity effected by the Revolution—notions of personal superiority, honor, and slight still remained a part of everyones private and public life. There is a false concreteness here: There never were, in lived lives as opposed to formal theory, three Estates; rather, there was and there remained a great-chain-of-status-and-dignities.

THE PARADOX OF JOHN STUART MILL

John Stuart Mill is the critical transitional figure between the classical liberalism of the 19th century, with its emphasis upon the creative power of free individuals unfettered by government or social interventions, and the welfare-state liberalism of the 20th century, with its combination of individual choice in matters of belief and lifestyle and the political redistribution of wealth. In On Liberty and The Subjection of Women , Mill offered a defense of self-sovereignty and voluntary association that appeared to extend explicitly to the economic spheres. Both works are celebrations of the productive and moral enhancements of individual liberty. In The Principles of Political Economy , however, Mills categorical distinction between “production” and “distribution” assigned the latter to the “expedient” discretion of the state, inviting, in theory, a democratic redistributionist state. Mills posthumous Essays on Socialism reveal that he was no friend of socialism or Marxism, but that he welcomed a more active and interventionist state. One of individual libertys most notable defenders, paradoxically, provided the theoretical underpinning of its current diminution.

On liberty and learning

T he idea that the university should act in loco parentis was one of the many traditional concepts of education abandoned during the campus upheavals of the late sixties and early seventies in favor of a laissez-faire attitude toward the personal conduct of students. Many colleges and universities with a sense of religious mission have steadfastly clung to such codes, while several secular institutions, motivated by growing concern about drugs and crime, are cautiously reconsidering their propriety. Furthermore, a new form of ideological in loco parentis, centering on the enforcement of politically correct speech and behavior, has lately surfaced as a means of furthering progressive social change. Four respondents--Alan Charles Kors, Lynne A. Munson, Quentin L. Quade, and Robert Royal--inquire whether some form of in loco parentis is still a necessary aspect of a decent and civil campus life, or art antiquated custom we are well rid of.