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Home , The Freeman

A REVlEWER’$ NOTEBOOK JOHN CHAMBERLAIN

No SINGLEperson starts a move- Bastiat and organizing something ment. In the late Nineteen Thir- called Pamphleteers, Inc., but he ties, whenthe so-called intellectu- was practically unknown on the als were moving in droves to the Eastern seaboard. Left, there were still a few strag- It was a strange, confusing gling advocates of what Leonard time. The New Deal had flopped; Read speaks of as the "freedom if unemployment was coming to philosophy." The stragglers, how- an end it was because war indus- ever, weren’t very clear about fun- tries were starting up. As Ran- damentals. dolph Bourne had put it, war was To indulge in some personal "the health of the State," proving reminiscence, I was impressed the futility of expecting govern- with ’s Our En- ment to run a peace-time economy. emy, The State but troubled by I don’t know how it was with Nock’s panacea, which others, but it took two books by would have made the State our women, each published in 1943, to universal landlord. The anti-Com- put my own groping thoughts munists- Eugene Lyons, Ben about the inequity of government Stolberg and others in the group enterprise into focus. The first that asked for asylum for Leon book was ’s The Trotsky on a purely civil liber- God of the Machine; the second tarian basis- were fighting an was ’s The Dis- obvious enemy, but they didn’t covery of Freedom. In their dif- have any positive theory of indi- ferent ways Mrs. Paterson and vidual freedom. Out on the West Mrs. Lane analyzed the relations Coast was reading between rights and the LICENSED TO UNZ.ORG ELECTRONIC REPRODUCTION PROHIBITED 699 700 THE FREEMAN November release of energy. Tracing the to be of "service" (she hated pro- "long circuit of energy" from its fessional Do-Gooders because they origins in free individual choice usually worked with extorted to its institutional embodiment in "other people’s money"), she could voluntary assocations of one sort be a twelve-hour-a-day letter or another, the two women arrived writer in behalf of spreading her at an identical conclusion: only philosophy. In the Thirties she under a Madisonian checks-and- gave up writing her best-selling balances system, with government fiction because she objected to pay- limited to defense, police power ing income taxes to finance com- and courts-of-justice functions, pulsory social security and the could humanity thrive. various bureaucracies of the Roos- The odd thing about it was that eveltian Welfare State. Her tor- the two women were not friends; rential energies were spent on Isabel Paterson could not forgive raising her own food on a few Rose Wilder Lane for havin~ been acres outside of Danbury, Connec- a socialist in the days when Jack ticut (she refused to have any- London was helping to organize thing to do with ration cards dur- the Intercollegiate Socialist Soci- ing the war), and on defending ety. This was Isabel’s mistake: and amplifying the "freedom phi- she could not see that some people losophy" in her correspondence have to learn from experie~Lce, as with numerous people. Mrs. Lane learned when she ob- There must be hundreds of served, from close up, what Fabi- Rose Wilder Lane letters in vari- anism and its harsher brother, ous files. Roger Lea MacBride has Leninist Bolshevism, had done to limited his selection for The Lady stop the flow of energy in ]~]urope and the Tycoon (Caxton Printers, and countries of the East. Signifi- $5.95) to the "best of letters be- cantly, both Mrs. Paterson and tween Rose Wilder Lane and Mrs. Lane had grown up on the Jasper Crane." There are 387 American frontier, where free- pages of these, w~ich is surely dom was most uninhibited. They enough to present an entirely rep- should have been friends. resentative sample of Mrs. Lane’s thinking over a quarter of a cen- Workingfrom Principle tury. When Rose Wilder Lane really Jasper Crane, the "tycoon" to latched on to a principle, she lived whom Mrs. Lane addressed her it. Although she insisted that she thoughts about freedom, had map- never did things out of a desire ped out a "freedom philosophy" LICENSED TO UNZ.ORG ELECTRONIC REPRODUCTION PROHIBITED 1973 THE LADY AND THE TYCOON 701 for himself partly by long and about ways and means of making arduous thinking about his ex- the more perience in industry (he was effective, which meant that she Du Pont Company executive) and approved of its founding in the partly by his reading, which ex- first place. tended from Biblical studies to Reading this selection from the the papers of James Madison. He Lane-Crane correspondence, one was a most tmderstanding corre- gets a very real sense of how the spondent whose short commenda- opposition to State intervention- tions and ~-ipostes brought out the ism of all sorts has grown from most able sort of exposition from practically nothing in 1943 to be- Mrs. Lane. The fact that he hap- come a most impressive movement pened to be a tycoon (meaning in the early Nineteen Seventies. monied industrialist) meant little Where once there were two wom- to Mrs. Lane, who didn’t think en writing books, a handful of movements thrived on money. The Vienna school economists (Van Fabians and early socialists had Mises and his followers) teaching worked best when lean and hun- in odd corners of our educational gry. She liked Jasper Crane be- system, and a Leonard Read with cat~se he was an activist who the idea of the Fot~ndation for agreed with her that all too many Economic Education at the back Big Businessmen had no sense of of his head, there are nowa score the philosophical underpinnings of of freedom publications (The Free- their own originally free system. man, HumanEvents, National Re- view, New Guard, The Alter- Organizational Activity native, Modern Age, et cetera), Rose Wilder Lane had no belief a plethora of "conservative" in organizations as such; she felt (meaning old-fashioned liberal) in her bones that the end of the newspaper columnists, good schools Twentieth Century would see a (Hillsdale and Rockford College, great renascence of individualist to name a couple), flourishing so- thinking simply because dedicated cieties (Mont Pelerin, the Phila- young people had begun to see delphia Society), foundations through the pretensions of the (FEE itself, the Institute for Welfare State. She was not, HumaneStudies, et cetera) and however, wholly consistent in her scattered but effective base in the attitude toward organizations. older university world (the Hoov- Many of her letters to Jasper er Institution at Stanford, for ex- Crane were devoted to thinking ample). LICENSED TO UNZ.ORG ELECTRONIC REPRODUCTION PROHIBITED 702 THE FREEMAN November

The Eternal Optimist THE POLITICAL ILLUSION by Rose Wilder Lane, the eternal Jacques Ellul (New York: Vintage optimist, kept pointing otlt the Books, 1972, 258 pp. $1.95) growth of understanding about Reviewed by Haven Bradford Gow to Jasper Crane, who was inclined on occasion to lament the THIS is not a witty or eloquent difficulties encountered by liber- work, but it certainly is a book tarians. Speaking of my own The which contains much wisdom. The Roots of Capitalism, Mr. Crane author, Jacques Ellul, is an emi- told Rose Lane that I did it. "with nent French social philosopher, quite inadequate monetary re- currently professor of law and his- ward." I earned enough from it to tory at the University of Bor- finance the period engaged in its deaux. He is the author of a num- researching and writing, which ber of seminal works, among which means that I got an education for are The Technological Society and free from doing it, a quite ade- False Presence of the Kingdom. quate compensation. My only wish The Technological Society, the is that someone would keep the author’s best-known work, is an book in print without worrying examination of the technical view about paying royalties until the of life-modern man’s obsession cost of a new edition had been en- with means, with techniques, espe- tirely absorbed. cially in the political order. This No mystic, Mrs. Lane felt that preoccupation with techniques in moral law existed in the grain of the political sphere is alarming, God’s universe on the same plane warns Ellul, for then moral and as the "natural" laws of physics, even personal considerations are chemistry and astronomy. As she shunted aside; and such values as saw it, one gets one’s comeup- freedom and justice are subordi- pance for murder or theft even as nated to the value of "efficiency." one is hurt if he or she steps out False Presence of the Kingdom of a second-story window. By the is an angry discussion of the polit- same token societies get their icization of the Church. It is not comeuppance when they depart the function of the Church to from the "natural" laws that gov- formulate grandiose social, eco- ern the release of human energy. nomic and political programs to Everything in Rose Wilder Lane’s achieve The Great Society, Ellul world moved toward consistency, declares, but increasing numbers which is what makes her letters a of church leaders have come to most treasured experience to read. believe that "politics constitutes a LICENSED TO UNZ.ORG ELECTRONIC REPRODUCTION PROHIBITED