WEBVTT NOTE The Complex Path of Ideological Change (video) 1 00:00:00.000 --> 00:00:02.000 The Theory of Money and Credit 2 00:00:30.000 --> 00:00:45.000 Welcome, everyone, to the F. A. Hayek Memorial Lecture. In the preface to his book, The Road to Serfdom, Hayek wrote, 3 00:00:45.000 --> 00:00:52.000 It was in no spirit of mockery that I dedicated it to the socialists of all parties. 4 00:00:52.000 --> 00:01:00.000 He hoped that the ideas in the book would change the prevailing socialist ideology and thereby avert even piecemeal attempts at state planning. 5 00:01:00.000 --> 00:01:08.000 He thought such planning would condition people to accept totalitarianism leading to the ruin of civilization. 6 00:01:08.000 --> 00:01:15.000 To commemorate his achievements and build on his foundation, we offer the F.A. Hayek Memorial Lecture. 7 00:01:15.000 --> 00:01:20.000 We are delighted to have Robert Higgs deliver this year's Hayek Memorial Lecture. 8 00:01:20.000 --> 00:01:36.000 Dr. Higgs is Senior Fellow in Political Economy at the Independent Institute. He has been on the faculty at the University of Washington, Lafayette College, where he was the William E. Simon Professor of Economics, and Seattle University. 9 00:01:36.000 --> 00:01:53.000 Dr. Higgs is the author or editor of 12 books, including three forthcoming this spring, The Challenge of Liberty, Depression, War and the Cold War, and The Political Economy of Fear and the Growth of Government. 10 00:01:53.000 --> 00:02:05.000 He has published scores of articles in scholarly and popular outlets, including the American Economic Review, the Journal of Political Economy, the Review of Economics and Statistics, 11 00:02:05.000 --> 00:02:11.600 The Journal of Economic History, The American Historical Review, The Oxford Economic Papers, 12 00:02:11.600 --> 00:02:16.120 The Review of Austrian Economics, and Advances in Austrian Economics. 13 00:02:16.120 --> 00:02:23.480 Dr. Higgs earned his B.A. cum laude in economics from San Francisco State College and his Ph.D. 14 00:02:23.480 --> 00:02:28.160 with distinction in political economy from the Johns Hopkins University. 15 00:02:28.160 --> 00:02:31.560 He is an adjunct scholar with the Ludwig von Mises Institute. 16 00:02:31.560 --> 00:02:37.560 Dr. Higgs will speak on the topic, The Complex Path of Ideological Change. 17 00:02:49.560 --> 00:02:56.560 It's an honor for me to have been invited to deliver the Hayek Memorial Lecture here this year. 18 00:02:56.560 --> 00:03:04.560 Friedrich Hayek was a most important figure in the development of my own thinking. 19 00:03:04.560 --> 00:03:18.560 And even more importantly, Hayek was the gate through which I entered the wonderful world of classical liberalism and libertarianism. 20 00:03:18.560 --> 00:03:32.560 He opened a gate that led me eventually to Mises and Rothbard and many others, some of whom are here today in this room. 21 00:03:32.560 --> 00:03:42.560 The past 35 years would have been totally different had I never encountered Hayek. 22 00:03:42.560 --> 00:03:51.440 Hayek. I feel I owe a great debt to him and I've continued to study his work ever since 23 00:03:51.440 --> 00:03:59.100 I first encountered it in the late 1960s and I feel I've received a great benefit from 24 00:03:59.100 --> 00:04:07.100 it. I don't count myself a disciple of Hayek's exactly and there are a number of points on 25 00:04:07.100 --> 00:04:13.780 In which I differ with him, but I think I could say that about anyone. 26 00:04:13.780 --> 00:04:19.420 So it's no great criticism if I do. 27 00:04:19.420 --> 00:04:26.460 I want to talk to you, as Jeff said, about the complex course of ideological change. 28 00:04:26.460 --> 00:04:32.020 And this is a subject I've dealt with in the past at various times. 29 00:04:32.020 --> 00:05:00.020 In the early 1980s, when I was composing my book, Crisis in Leviathan, I devoted substantial effort to considering what scholars had written about the nature of ideology, its role in the social system, its causes and its consequences. 30 00:05:00.020 --> 00:05:10.020 In studying the growth of government, I had become convinced that ideological change had played a critical role in propelling that growth. 31 00:05:10.020 --> 00:05:28.020 In the century analyzed in my book, roughly from the 1880s to the 1980s, various forms of large group collective action had obviously helped to bring about increases in the government's size, scope and power. 32 00:05:28.020 --> 00:05:39.020 Yet most economists, and some other analysts as well, convinced by Mansur Olson's pioneering analysis of collective action, 33 00:05:39.020 --> 00:05:43.020 seemed to find such collective action paradoxical. 34 00:05:43.020 --> 00:05:51.020 In the light of Olson's analysis, the historical actors appeared to have behaved irrationally, 35 00:05:51.020 --> 00:05:57.520 And social scientists have little, if anything, to say about irrational action. 36 00:05:57.520 --> 00:06:06.520 Beyond mere descriptions of what has been called the extraordinary popular delusions and the madness of crowds, 37 00:06:06.520 --> 00:06:12.520 what systematic account can anyone give of actions that make no sense? 38 00:06:12.520 --> 00:06:20.520 As I developed my own thinking about ideology, I came to an understanding in which ideologically motivated action 39 00:06:20.520 --> 00:06:32.520 can be seen as no less rational than the kinds of actions that economists routinely explain by appealing to so-called material self-interests. 40 00:06:32.520 --> 00:06:39.520 In the light of this understanding, I developed consistent explanations of various sorts of collective action, 41 00:06:39.520 --> 00:06:44.520 including those that had played crucial roles in bringing about the modern growth of government. 42 00:06:44.520 --> 00:06:56.520 One might criticize or condemn those actions on many grounds, but as I had come to understand them, the cloud of irrationality no longer hung over them. 43 00:06:56.520 --> 00:07:06.520 Moreover, in this view, any shrinkage of the enormous governments that had come into existence by the middle of the 20th century, 44 00:07:06.520 --> 00:07:19.520 and had continued to grow relentlessly thereafter would require ideologically motivated action just as much as their creation had required such action in the first place. 45 00:07:19.520 --> 00:07:34.520 A reversal hinged only on changing the content of the reigning ideology by reverting to something like the classical liberal ideology that had dominated the thinking of many Western Europeans in the mid-19th century 46 00:07:34.520 --> 00:07:49.520 and most American opinion leaders as late as the 1880s and 1890s, with its emphasis on individualism, steadfast private property rights, and limited government. 47 00:07:49.520 --> 00:07:56.520 On the question of ideological change, however, I had reached few satisfying answers. 48 00:07:56.520 --> 00:08:07.520 In my account of changes in politico-economic institutions, I had resigned myself, for the most part, to treating ideological change as exogenous. 49 00:08:07.520 --> 00:08:20.520 One notable exception was that in dealing with the great crises of the 20th century, I had developed what I called a partial hypothesis on ideological change 50 00:08:20.520 --> 00:08:34.520 to help me account for the ratchet effect on the size, scope, and power of U.S. government that characterized most visibly its growth during the World War eras and the Great Depression. 51 00:08:34.520 --> 00:08:47.520 Although I continue to believe that my partial hypothesis has substantial validity, I have never supposed that it comes close to providing a complete theory of ideological change. 52 00:08:47.520 --> 00:09:07.520 Ultimately, we also need, at the very least, a compelling way to understand the long-term drift of ideology that seems to have been so decisive in determining secular changes in the fundamental character of the political economy throughout the Western world. 53 00:09:07.520 --> 00:09:19.520 Today, I'm reviewing elements of my previous analysis of ideology. I'll discuss further some important aspects of ideological change, 54 00:09:19.520 --> 00:09:34.520 indicate how certain notable thinkers have tried to account for such change, and suggest how we might more productively go about studying open questions that invite further research. 55 00:09:34.520 --> 00:09:44.920 I'll talk now about what ideology is and how it works. 56 00:09:44.920 --> 00:09:50.360 Ideology is a vigorously contested concept. 57 00:09:50.360 --> 00:09:58.440 All scholars agree, however, that it is not synonymous with just any idea or set of ideas. 58 00:09:58.440 --> 00:10:10.440 Although ideas serve as its elements, an ideology consists of certain kinds of ideas spanning a particular realm of reference. 59 00:10:10.440 --> 00:10:23.440 In my conceptualization, it denotes a somewhat coherent, rather comprehensive belief system about social relations. 60 00:10:23.440 --> 00:10:29.220 To say that it is somewhat coherent implies that its components hang together, though 61 00:10:29.220 --> 00:10:35.040 not necessarily in a way that would satisfy a logician. 62 00:10:35.040 --> 00:10:41.080 To say that it is rather comprehensive implies that it subsumes a wide variety of social 63 00:10:41.080 --> 00:10:45.720 categories and their interrelations. 64 00:10:45.720 --> 00:10:52.680 Notwithstanding its extensive scope, it tends to revolve about only a few central values 65 00:10:52.680 --> 00:11:02.680 such as individual freedom, social equality, or national glory. 66 00:11:02.680 --> 00:11:11.680 Ideology has four distinct aspects. 67 00:11:11.680 --> 00:11:19.680 Cognitive, moral, programmatic, and solidary. 68 00:11:19.680 --> 00:11:34.680 This structures a person's perceptions and predetermines his understandings of events in the social world, expressing these cognitions and characteristic symbols. 69 00:11:34.680 --> 00:11:43.680 It tells him whether the social conduct he sees is good, bad, or morally neutral. 70 00:11:43.680 --> 00:11:48.960 and it propels him to act in accordance with his cognitions and moral assessments as a 71 00:11:48.960 --> 00:11:57.240 committed member of a political action group in pursuit of definite social objectives. 72 00:11:57.240 --> 00:12:03.280 Ideologies perform an important psychological service because without them people cannot 73 00:12:03.280 --> 00:12:11.120 know, assess and respond to much of the vast world of social relations. 74 00:12:11.120 --> 00:12:19.520 Ideology simplifies a reality too huge and complicated to be comprehended, evaluated 75 00:12:19.520 --> 00:12:28.200 and dealt with in any purely factual, scientific or other disinterested way. 76 00:12:28.200 --> 00:12:36.080 Every sane adult, unless he is completely apathetic politically, has an ideology. 77 00:12:36.080 --> 00:12:41.620 The notion that ideology is only the distorted, fanatical thought of one's intellectual or 78 00:12:41.620 --> 00:12:57.280 political opponents cannot be sustained, although some maintain precisely that view of ideology. 79 00:12:57.280 --> 00:13:05.160 Of course, every ideology must deal in part with factual, scientific, and other hard knowledge, 80 00:13:05.160 --> 00:13:10.840 And to the extent that it makes assumptions or claims inconsistent with such well confirmed 81 00:13:10.840 --> 00:13:16.640 socially tested knowledge, we may properly accuse it of distortion. 82 00:13:16.640 --> 00:13:24.400 Nevertheless, all ideologies contain unverified elements, some of which, including their fundamental 83 00:13:24.400 --> 00:13:29.520 commitments to certain values, are unverifiable. 84 00:13:29.520 --> 00:13:35.100 In relation to these elements, which are neither true nor false, the allegation of distortion 85 00:13:35.100 --> 00:13:37.620 has little or no meaning. 86 00:13:37.620 --> 00:13:45.920 As Thomas K. Merton once exclaimed, on what grounds may one attribute or refuse validity 87 00:13:45.920 --> 00:13:49.780 to ethical norms? 88 00:13:49.780 --> 00:13:54.440 If someone believes that the protection of individual freedom, the enforcement of social 89 00:13:54.440 --> 00:14:08.440 Social equality or the attainment of national glory should be the paramount objective of sociopolitical action. No empirical test can falsify that conviction. 90 00:14:08.440 --> 00:14:18.440 Most hypotheses about the sources of ideological commitment are either interest theories or strain theories. 91 00:14:18.440 --> 00:14:23.840 In interest theories, people are assumed to pursue wealth or power, and ideologies serve 92 00:14:23.840 --> 00:14:30.240 as weapons in the struggle by lending legitimacy to their pursuits. 93 00:14:30.240 --> 00:14:38.060 In strain theories, people are assumed to flee from socioeconomic anxieties, and ideologies 94 00:14:38.060 --> 00:14:43.520 bring them comfort and fellowship. 95 00:14:43.520 --> 00:14:50.920 Recall that ideology has four aspects, cognitive, moral, programmatic and solidary. 96 00:14:50.920 --> 00:14:57.320 If it had only the first three, we would have no grounds for identifying it as a basis of 97 00:14:57.320 --> 00:15:01.760 rational participation in large group politics. 98 00:15:01.760 --> 00:15:07.200 In that event, ideology would allow one to perceive and interpret the social world, to 99 00:15:07.200 --> 00:15:13.160 impose moral valuations on it, and to conclude that certain political positions or movements 100 00:15:13.160 --> 00:15:23.300 deserve support. Yet one would lack a personal incentive to take any political action, because, 101 00:15:23.300 --> 00:15:30.640 as Olson explained, it would be rational to free ride. To join rationally in political 102 00:15:30.640 --> 00:15:38.300 action in a large group context, one must expect a benefit that is contingent on one's 103 00:15:38.300 --> 00:15:48.540 Own Participation. Solidarity, the fourth aspect of ideology, is such a contingent benefit 104 00:15:48.540 --> 00:15:57.140 by virtue of its important connection with the maintenance of personal identity. People 105 00:15:57.140 --> 00:16:02.660 acquire and sustain their personal identities within groups by their interaction with other 106 00:16:02.660 --> 00:16:10.060 are members, first in families, then in various primary and secondary reference groups. 107 00:16:10.060 --> 00:16:18.020 The kind of groups to which a person chooses to belong is closely connected with the kind 108 00:16:18.020 --> 00:16:26.180 of person he takes himself to be, a prime concern to the typical individual. 109 00:16:26.180 --> 00:16:33.580 People crave the comfort of association with those they recognize as their own kind. 110 00:16:33.580 --> 00:16:38.620 In the absence of such community membership and involvement in the group's common purposes, 111 00:16:38.620 --> 00:16:41.820 people tend to feel alienated and depressed. 112 00:16:41.820 --> 00:16:48.140 Aristotle wasn't joking when he described man as a social animal. 113 00:16:48.140 --> 00:16:53.260 By internalizing the values and precepts of their communities of shared belief, people 114 00:16:53.260 --> 00:17:10.260 will not only feel better about themselves, they also become trustworthy adherents who will act in accordance with their ideology without or even in opposition to external material enticement. 115 00:17:10.260 --> 00:17:15.260 Yet such action is completely rational. 116 00:17:15.260 --> 00:17:29.260 It need only be seen as a secular application of the calculus expressed in the biblical admonition for what shall it profit a man if he shall gain the whole world and lose his soul. 117 00:17:29.260 --> 00:17:43.260 The truth, as Samuel Bowles has succinctly expressed it, is that, quote, people act politically both to get things and to be someone. 118 00:17:43.260 --> 00:17:55.260 In fact, although the typical economist would be greatly astonished to discover this fact, more people may act politically to be someone than to get things. 119 00:17:55.260 --> 00:18:04.260 Expressive motivations surely play a much greater role than the classical economic theories of politics have recognized. 120 00:18:04.260 --> 00:18:12.540 Hence, many people routinely participate in such large group political actions as voting 121 00:18:12.540 --> 00:18:19.000 or giving money or personal services to political pressure groups, and they episodically join 122 00:18:19.000 --> 00:18:26.140 in mass endeavors to alter society on a grand scale, sometimes even in violent and risky 123 00:18:26.140 --> 00:18:30.100 attempts to overthrow the government. 124 00:18:30.100 --> 00:18:35.300 They take these actions not because they are irrational, but because their self-perceived 125 00:18:35.300 --> 00:18:38.260 identities are at stake. 126 00:18:38.260 --> 00:18:45.100 Not by accident do activists try to shame holdouts by asking rhetorically, what kind 127 00:18:45.100 --> 00:18:51.400 of person are you anyhow? 128 00:18:51.400 --> 00:18:58.740 By acting in concert with others who embrace the same ideology, people enjoy a solidarity 129 00:18:58.740 --> 00:19:03.060 essential to the maintenance of their identities. 130 00:19:03.060 --> 00:19:08.620 They cannot receive this form of utility without acting. 131 00:19:08.620 --> 00:19:12.900 There is no closet solidarity. 132 00:19:12.900 --> 00:19:20.440 Or in Brennan and Lomasky's terminology, no expressive utility without actual expression. 133 00:19:20.440 --> 00:19:25.560 To behave differently, a person would have to be different. 134 00:19:25.560 --> 00:19:32.600 being different would require the internalization of a different ideology. 135 00:19:32.600 --> 00:19:39.520 Ideologies give rise to the personal political complex of identity, solidarity, and political 136 00:19:39.520 --> 00:19:45.600 action in large part because of their inherent moral content. 137 00:19:45.600 --> 00:19:52.840 Ultimately, many political actors treat the choice between right and wrong as more fundamental 138 00:19:52.840 --> 00:19:59.640 and the choices they view as purely instrumental. 139 00:19:59.640 --> 00:20:06.120 I want to turn now to theories of ideological change. 140 00:20:06.120 --> 00:20:13.060 I'll introduce some simple terminology to help us analyze how ideologies change and 141 00:20:13.060 --> 00:20:19.600 my basic categories of ideological change will distinguish whether it is temporally 142 00:20:19.600 --> 00:20:28.960 Steady or Irregular, and whether it is causally theory-driven or event-driven. 143 00:20:49.600 --> 00:21:02.540 The timing category is straightforward and refers to the pace at which ideological change 144 00:21:02.540 --> 00:21:09.760 takes place, distinguishing even change from erratic change. 145 00:21:09.760 --> 00:21:15.760 Many discussions of ideological change presume the former, as if an ideology by its very 146 00:21:15.760 --> 00:21:23.820 Every nature had a sort of inertia that keeps it from ever changing abruptly. Hence, ideological 147 00:21:23.820 --> 00:21:30.480 gradual change is the only kind possible in obedience, as it were, to the motto on the 148 00:21:30.480 --> 00:21:38.660 title page of Alfred Marshall's Principles of Economics. Recall that, natura non facet 149 00:21:38.660 --> 00:21:48.460 Saltem, Nature Does Not Make Jumps, Irregular Ideological Change, in contrast, denotes a 150 00:21:48.460 --> 00:21:55.940 process in which ideology may change slowly or not at all for a while, then more quickly, 151 00:21:55.940 --> 00:22:03.700 even abruptly, in a relatively brief episode, perhaps as a result of a great social upheaval 152 00:22:03.700 --> 00:22:10.860 such as war, revolution, or economic collapse. 153 00:22:10.860 --> 00:22:15.980 My causal categories pertain to the way in which an ideological change spreads from its 154 00:22:15.980 --> 00:22:26.760 original source to penetrate the mass public or a substantial segment of it. 155 00:22:26.760 --> 00:22:32.880 In one conception of this transit, which I call theory-driven, it consists of a conveyance 156 00:22:32.880 --> 00:22:40.040 Transmissions through successive types of actors who contribute to the process of dissemination. 157 00:22:40.040 --> 00:22:44.880 This form of transmission often traces the locus of adoption from a great thinker, which 158 00:22:44.880 --> 00:22:50.720 I put in capital letters, a great thinker to the relatively small but articulate group 159 00:22:50.720 --> 00:22:58.000 of intellectuals Hayek labeled the second-hand dealers and ideas, thence to a larger group 160 00:22:58.000 --> 00:23:09.000 to a group of community opinion leaders and ultimately to a much larger group of ordinary recipients who embrace the new or revamped ideology. 161 00:23:09.000 --> 00:23:22.000 Probably the most famous expression of a theory-driven model of ideological change appears in the final paragraph of John Maynard Cain's General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money. 162 00:23:22.000 --> 00:23:39.000 The Ideas of Economists and Political Philosophers, both when they are right and when they are wrong, are more powerful than is commonly understood. 163 00:23:39.000 --> 00:23:45.720 Indeed, the world is ruled by little else. Practical men who believe themselves to be 164 00:23:45.720 --> 00:23:55.440 quite exempt from any intellectual influences are usually the slaves of some defunct economist. 165 00:23:55.440 --> 00:24:01.920 Mad men in authority who hear voices in the air are distilling their frenzy from some 166 00:24:01.920 --> 00:24:08.720 academic scribbler of a few years back. I am sure that the power of vested interest 167 00:24:08.720 --> 00:24:38.720 This is vastly exaggerated when compared with the gradual encroachment of ideas, not indeed immediately, but after a certain interval, for in the field of economic and political philosophy, there are not many who are influenced by new theories after they are 25 or 30 years of age, so that the ideas which civil servants and politicians and even agitators apply to current events are not likely to be the newest. 168 00:24:38.720 --> 00:25:07.720 Hayek could scarcely have agreed more. Indeed, in a 1949 article titled The Intellectuals and Socialism in the University of Chicago Law Review, his words almost echoed those Keynes had written 13 years earlier. 169 00:25:07.720 --> 00:25:23.720 What to the contemporary observer appears as a battle of conflicting interests has indeed often been decided long before in a clash of ideas confined to narrow circles. 170 00:25:23.720 --> 00:25:38.720 Mises, in many of his writings, declared his belief that what determines the course of a nation's economic policies is always the economic ideas held by public opinion. 171 00:25:38.720 --> 00:25:47.720 No government, whether democratic or dictatorial, can free itself from the sway of generally accepted ideology. 172 00:25:47.720 --> 00:25:56.520 Moreover, in certain passages, Mises maintained the theory-driven view of ideological change 173 00:25:56.520 --> 00:26:05.680 in extraordinarily strong form, only very few men, he declared, have the gift of thinking 174 00:26:05.680 --> 00:26:16.560 new and original ideas and of changing the traditional body of creeds and doctrines. 175 00:26:16.560 --> 00:26:21.560 Hayek had the good fortune to become the eponym for what Milton Friedman and Rose Friedman 176 00:26:21.560 --> 00:26:28.980 have described as a long ideological wave beginning in the latter part of the 20th century 177 00:26:28.980 --> 00:26:37.480 in which the Friedmans perceived that a Fabian tide of interventionism gave way to a Hayekian 178 00:26:37.480 --> 00:26:45.560 tide of opposition to central planning and support for greater economic freedom. 179 00:26:45.560 --> 00:26:51.240 Hayek not only argued in favor of the theory driven model of ideological change in its 180 00:26:51.240 --> 00:26:57.960 great thinker variant, but according to the Friedmans embodied it as well. 181 00:26:57.960 --> 00:27:03.240 And just parenthetically I think we may wonder whether the arguably more influential Milton 182 00:27:03.240 --> 00:27:10.600 Friedman was only being modest by naming this alleged phenomenon after Hayek rather than 183 00:27:10.600 --> 00:27:11.600 himself. 184 00:27:11.600 --> 00:27:34.200 Theory-driven ideological change flows, as it were, straight downhill, from an exalted origin in the pronouncements of a great thinker, 185 00:27:34.200 --> 00:27:43.700 often expressed in a big book such as The Wealth of Nations, Das Kapital, or The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money 186 00:27:43.700 --> 00:27:52.700 via one or more intermediary groups of intellectually less illustrious disseminators and on down to the masses 187 00:27:52.700 --> 00:28:03.200 who it seems scarcely have an independent thought, but absorb or not whatever washes over them from above. 188 00:28:03.200 --> 00:28:25.200 As Hayek put it, quote, once the more active part of the intellectuals, that is the second hand dealers, have been converted to a set of beliefs, the process by which these become generally accepted is almost automatic and irresistible, end quote. 189 00:28:25.200 --> 00:28:42.200 Perhaps it's to be expected that men such as Mises, Hayek, and Keynes should believe that great thinkers play the key role in bringing about ideological change, as Peter Bergman and Thomas Luckman have remarked, 190 00:28:42.200 --> 00:28:53.200 To exaggerate the importance of theoretical thought in society and history is a natural failing of theorizers," end quote. 191 00:28:53.200 --> 00:29:01.200 We're well advised, however, to inquire into whether ideological change may have other sources as well, 192 00:29:01.200 --> 00:29:12.200 and if it does, into how such sources are related to the contributions that great thinkers unquestionably make to the process. 193 00:29:25.200 --> 00:29:30.200 I want to speak now for a while about ideology and social structure. 194 00:29:31.200 --> 00:30:00.700 I didn't say anything about Hans-Hermann Hoppe, but you'll see I put him in my diagram here because I was trying to fill in all the cells and I hadn't had anyone who clearly fit in that cell I put Hans into but I think perhaps he belongs there. 195 00:30:00.700 --> 00:30:18.300 I put a question mark because I'm not sure, but I was reading something in one of his writings recently that led me to believe that might be the appropriate place to put him as a thinker about ideological change. 196 00:30:18.300 --> 00:30:30.300 Not much investigation is required to discover that many scholars, even entire disciplines, have disputed what I'm calling the theory-driven model. 197 00:30:30.300 --> 00:30:43.300 The sociology of knowledge, a field that took shape largely in Germany and France in the 1920s and 1930s, 198 00:30:43.300 --> 00:30:55.300 Though its interwar practitioners had much earlier precursors, defines its domain as the relations between social structure and social thought. 199 00:30:55.300 --> 00:31:05.300 Perhaps the most influential pioneer was Carl Mannheim, whose best known work is Ideology and Utopia. 200 00:31:05.300 --> 00:31:12.300 The acknowledged modern giant in this field is Columbia University sociologist Robert K. Merton, 201 00:31:12.300 --> 00:31:27.300 who died in 2003 after a long life and long career, who is best known for his contributions to the sociology of science, although his writings and influence ranged widely. 202 00:31:27.300 --> 00:31:35.300 Unfortunately, many writers in this field have taken too seriously what Karl Marx had to say about the subject. 203 00:31:35.300 --> 00:31:45.300 Marx, of course, maintained the exact opposite of the theory-driven model, espousing instead a paradigmatic version of what I call the event-driven model. 204 00:31:45.300 --> 00:32:00.300 As he put it, quote, it is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but on the contrary, their social existence determines their consciousness, end quote. 205 00:32:00.300 --> 00:32:22.300 For Marx, at least the earlier Marx, ideology is mere superstructure, its content being entirely dependent on the mode of production, a social complex that comprises the economic production technology and the associated property rights regime. 206 00:32:22.300 --> 00:32:34.300 Hence, as technology and property relations change, ideology, along with everything else in the superstructure, changes accordingly. 207 00:32:34.300 --> 00:32:41.300 Lewis Kozer points out that in their later writings, Marx and Engels, quote, 208 00:32:41.300 --> 00:32:50.300 represented a certain degree of intrinsic autonomy to the development of legal, political, religious, literary and artistic ideas 209 00:32:50.300 --> 00:33:06.300 and allowed that the intellectual superstructure of society was not simply a reflection of the infrastructure, but rather could in turn react upon it. 210 00:33:06.300 --> 00:33:18.300 Mises naturally disagreed with Marx about the event-driven model, as he disagreed in virtually every other regard, 211 00:33:18.300 --> 00:33:26.300 and he expressed his disagreement in the form of an adamant denial that social structure affects ideology at all. 212 00:33:26.300 --> 00:33:42.300 Society and any concrete order of social affairs are an outcome of ideologies. Ideologies are not, as Marxism asserts, a product of a certain state of social affairs. 213 00:33:42.300 --> 00:33:57.300 I do not accept this claim, except in the trivial sense that for any individual act an idea of possibility and an idea of purpose must always proceed a specific action. 214 00:33:57.300 --> 00:34:10.300 In a broader sense, however, the proposition that an individual's personal experiences and his social circumstances condition to some degree his ideological conceptions 215 00:34:10.300 --> 00:34:17.300 seems to me almost self-evident and to accord with a great deal of empirical evidence. 216 00:34:17.300 --> 00:34:23.300 Therefore, I maintain that we can deny the extreme Marxian proposition 217 00:34:23.300 --> 00:34:29.300 without throwing away the sociology of knowledge completely. 218 00:34:29.300 --> 00:34:35.300 And I'll add parenthetically that Mises' own statements in other passages 219 00:34:35.300 --> 00:35:01.460 Among the most instructive modern writers in the sociology of knowledge, Berger and 220 00:35:01.460 --> 00:35:07.560 and Luckman develop a multitude of ideas in sensible fashion in their 1966 book, The Social 221 00:35:07.560 --> 00:35:15.560 Construction of Reality, a treatise in the sociology of knowledge. They insist that the 222 00:35:15.560 --> 00:35:24.700 relationship between ideas and their sustaining social processes is always a dialectical one. 223 00:35:24.700 --> 00:35:30.920 Expanding on this idea, they write as follows. Theories are concocted in order to legitimate 224 00:35:30.920 --> 00:35:35.080 already existing social institutions. 225 00:35:35.080 --> 00:35:40.500 But it also happens that social institutions are changed in order to bring them into conformity 226 00:35:40.500 --> 00:35:47.120 with already existing theories, that is to make them more legitimate. 227 00:35:47.120 --> 00:35:53.860 The experts in legitimation may operate as theoretical justifiers of the status quo. 228 00:35:53.860 --> 00:35:59.480 They may also appear as revolutionary ideologists. 229 00:35:59.480 --> 00:36:03.600 Theories of reality have self-fulfilling potency. 230 00:36:03.600 --> 00:36:09.760 Theories can be realized in history, even theories that were highly abstruse when they 231 00:36:09.760 --> 00:36:13.080 were first conceived by their inventors. 232 00:36:13.080 --> 00:36:19.240 Consequently, social change must always be understood as standing in a dialectical relationship 233 00:36:19.240 --> 00:36:22.320 to the history of ideas. 234 00:36:22.320 --> 00:36:30.200 Both idealistic and materialistic understandings of the relationship overlook this dialectic 235 00:36:30.200 --> 00:36:36.200 and thus distort history." 236 00:36:36.200 --> 00:36:42.000 The sociology of knowledge counsels us to take account of how people's concrete experiences 237 00:36:42.000 --> 00:36:48.600 of life, with all the peculiarities specific to a particular time and place, may shape 238 00:36:48.600 --> 00:36:54.760 break their beliefs about social relations, perhaps in ways that are more or less independent 239 00:36:54.760 --> 00:37:00.920 of the products of great thinkers and the efforts of those who disseminate their theories. 240 00:37:00.920 --> 00:37:19.160 Here everyday life comes to play a potentially important role for both elites and masses. 241 00:37:19.160 --> 00:37:32.080 I'll speak now about the influence of events on ideological change. 242 00:37:32.080 --> 00:37:38.080 If Burton Folsom is correct to have written that, quote, rarely do people convert by reading 243 00:37:38.080 --> 00:37:46.200 tracks or listening to theories, and if events as such can affect whether individuals embrace 244 00:37:46.200 --> 00:37:57.200 If we don't embrace or reject an ideology, then another source of ideological change exists besides the theories that percolate down from great thinkers to the masses. 245 00:37:57.200 --> 00:38:07.200 Of course, events, no matter how earth-shaking they may be, do not interpret themselves in ideological terms. 246 00:38:07.200 --> 00:38:13.400 So when we speak of the influence of events on ideological change, we mean something qualitatively 247 00:38:13.400 --> 00:38:19.380 different from the influence of articulated ideas that intellectuals employ to express 248 00:38:19.380 --> 00:38:22.900 a belief system about social relations. 249 00:38:22.900 --> 00:38:30.600 We refer much more to acceptance or rejection, especially among the masses, than to formulation 250 00:38:30.600 --> 00:38:33.780 de novo. 251 00:38:33.780 --> 00:38:39.860 To appreciate how events come into play, we need to recognize that in any modern society, 252 00:38:39.860 --> 00:38:47.180 except perhaps a totalitarian society, although probably there too in the shadows, more than 253 00:38:47.180 --> 00:38:57.780 one ideology exists, and hence ideological competition occurs all the time. 254 00:38:57.780 --> 00:39:16.780 Proponents of rival ideologies take various actions to express their beliefs, sometimes to reassure those of like mind and keep them in line, but often in the hope of winning converts or, at a minimum, of raising doubts among opponents and the undecided. 255 00:39:16.780 --> 00:39:36.780 Among the masses especially, the undecided or only weakly committed may well constitute a large proportion, and therefore the potential often exists for a minority ideology to gain societal ascendancy if the loosely anchored persons can be pulled over. 256 00:39:36.780 --> 00:39:46.780 Michael Roseff, who is going to speak to us later today, calls this idea the up-for-grabs hypothesis. 257 00:39:46.780 --> 00:39:54.780 In this quest, ideologues may labor diligently for years, hoping to win converts little by little, 258 00:39:54.780 --> 00:39:59.780 or to prepare them to soften them up, as it were, 259 00:39:59.780 --> 00:40:08.980 in anticipation of opportunities to bring them over that may emerge in a future crisis. 260 00:40:08.980 --> 00:40:16.540 This softening up aspect of ideological endeavor may have great importance even though it seems 261 00:40:16.540 --> 00:40:23.180 completely futile during the normal stretches of social life when social, economic, political 262 00:40:23.180 --> 00:40:30.980 and Ideological Relations change slowly because when the crisis does arrive, its advent creates 263 00:40:30.980 --> 00:40:36.740 extraordinary potential for ideological shake-up. 264 00:40:36.740 --> 00:40:44.380 Crisis by its very nature creates heightened insecurities and in extreme cases widespread 265 00:40:44.380 --> 00:40:48.460 bewilderment among the populace. 266 00:40:48.460 --> 00:40:57.260 War, Revolution, Economic Collapse, Runaway Inflation, Extreme Domestic Disorder all create 267 00:40:57.260 --> 00:41:05.920 new fears and all tend to discredit established beliefs and to open new possibilities for 268 00:41:05.920 --> 00:41:14.860 the successful propagation of novel understandings, evaluations and political programs. 269 00:41:14.860 --> 00:41:20.260 After all, whatever the claims that sustain the old order, social arrangements will now 270 00:41:20.260 --> 00:41:28.900 be seen as manifestly not working any longer in critical respects. 271 00:41:28.900 --> 00:41:34.380 Supporters of the established order tremble in the face of such adverse, perplexing, but 272 00:41:34.380 --> 00:41:37.420 undeniable events. 273 00:41:37.420 --> 00:41:44.380 Some devotees of orthodoxy lose heart, and some abandon their old ideology and embrace 274 00:41:44.380 --> 00:41:47.180 is a competing one. 275 00:41:47.180 --> 00:41:53.140 Recall as an outstanding example how many people, both intellectuals and ordinary persons, 276 00:41:53.140 --> 00:42:01.460 forsook classical liberalism and took up some species of collectivism during the Great Depression. 277 00:42:01.460 --> 00:42:05.220 Even many people who should have known better. 278 00:42:05.220 --> 00:42:09.380 I'll name no names here. 279 00:42:09.380 --> 00:42:15.680 Many such crisis conditions prevailed when, in 1935, Keynes wrote the passage I quoted 280 00:42:15.680 --> 00:42:22.840 earlier about the potency of ideas. With regard to the prospects for adoption of the measures 281 00:42:22.840 --> 00:42:29.460 he tried to justify in his book, he wrote, at the present time people are unusually expectant 282 00:42:29.460 --> 00:42:38.780 of a more fundamental diagnosis, more particularly ready to receive it, eager to try it out if 283 00:42:38.780 --> 00:42:45.100 and if it should be even plausible." 284 00:42:45.100 --> 00:42:50.280 Keynes seemed to sense the same increased public receptivity to new ideas and new programs 285 00:42:50.280 --> 00:42:55.260 that Franklin Roosevelt perceived at the trough of the Great Depression. 286 00:42:55.260 --> 00:43:02.780 When he declared in a campaign speech, the country needs, and unless I mistake its temper, 287 00:43:02.780 --> 00:43:12.260 The country demands bold, persistent experimentation. It is common sense to take a method and try 288 00:43:12.260 --> 00:43:23.580 it. If it fails, admit it frankly and try another. But above all, try something. 289 00:43:23.580 --> 00:43:29.860 Only in a crisis, when previously established convictions have been thrown into doubt, can 290 00:43:29.860 --> 00:43:39.580 and such blind and ignorant flailing about strike many people as well-advised policy-making. 291 00:43:39.580 --> 00:43:47.500 Of course, the Roosevelt administration did not seek to try just anything, and such political 292 00:43:47.500 --> 00:43:54.340 predisposition is what brings ideological preconditions to the fore. 293 00:43:54.340 --> 00:43:58.700 Certain economic theorists like to repeat the old saying, you can't beat something 294 00:43:58.700 --> 00:44:01.200 with Nothing. 295 00:44:01.200 --> 00:44:08.140 By that quip, they mean that an existing theory's inability to explain certain events is not 296 00:44:08.140 --> 00:44:11.300 enough to discredit it. 297 00:44:11.300 --> 00:44:16.820 One must replace it with a more compelling theory. 298 00:44:16.820 --> 00:44:22.980 Thomas Kuhns argued that the same thing may be said of the sciences. 299 00:44:22.980 --> 00:44:27.760 The same thing may be said of ideological change. 300 00:44:27.760 --> 00:44:33.320 No matter how frightened and bewildered people are, no matter how terribly the old arrangements 301 00:44:33.320 --> 00:44:39.300 seem to be working, people will abandon their old convictions only if they have something 302 00:44:39.300 --> 00:44:43.720 seemingly better to put in their place. 303 00:44:43.720 --> 00:44:49.320 In this light, we see the importance of the softening up phase. 304 00:44:49.320 --> 00:44:56.520 When hopeful ideologues cultivate public opinion and prepare it to receive and germinate their 305 00:44:56.520 --> 00:45:02.520 and their brand of seed when the season is propitious. 306 00:45:02.520 --> 00:45:09.520 Persuading people to believe a completely novel set of ideas is much more difficult 307 00:45:09.520 --> 00:45:15.520 than edging a great many confused and fearful individuals over the line. 308 00:45:15.520 --> 00:45:21.520 That line itself having been drawn over a period of years or perhaps even decades 309 00:45:21.520 --> 00:45:27.720 effort by missionaries with their voices crying out in the wilderness warning people 310 00:45:27.720 --> 00:45:34.400 against the false ideological gods that they currently worship and offering alternative 311 00:45:34.400 --> 00:45:39.320 belief systems for them to embrace. 312 00:45:39.320 --> 00:45:44.320 Crisis however is not the only occasion when events influence the course of ideological 313 00:45:44.320 --> 00:45:51.920 and Social Change. 314 00:45:51.920 --> 00:46:00.560 Although the events characterized as socioeconomic trends may not be so dramatic, they operate 315 00:46:00.560 --> 00:46:06.540 relentlessly and cumulatively and hence over a long period they may bring about a substantial 316 00:46:06.540 --> 00:46:11.640 shift in the ideological center of gravity. 317 00:46:11.640 --> 00:46:18.040 The broad societal transformations that we summarize by terms such as industrialization, 318 00:46:18.040 --> 00:46:26.040 urbanization, domestic and international migration, the aging of the population, and so forth, 319 00:46:26.040 --> 00:46:32.320 bring about changes in social structure, that is the composite of social roles being played 320 00:46:32.320 --> 00:46:37.760 by persons in the various segments of the population. 321 00:46:37.760 --> 00:46:43.800 As the social structure changes, the relative representation in the population changes for 322 00:46:43.800 --> 00:46:49.360 persons living in the different socioeconomic contexts. 323 00:46:49.360 --> 00:46:55.520 In the face of these transformations, we are well advised to consider that, as Thorsten 324 00:46:55.520 --> 00:47:01.580 Vedlen wrote, the scheme of thought or of knowledge is in good part a reverberation 325 00:47:01.580 --> 00:47:04.800 of the schemes of life. 326 00:47:04.800 --> 00:47:12.200 Or in Mises' words, except for the very few who are capable of original thought, a person's 327 00:47:12.200 --> 00:47:20.000 quote, ideology is what his environment enjoins upon him. 328 00:47:20.000 --> 00:47:27.680 For example, whereas the average American worker in the late 1870s worked on a farm, 329 00:47:27.680 --> 00:47:34.440 and many people in agriculture and elsewhere were self-employed, the great majority of 330 00:47:34.440 --> 00:48:03.440 If proposals for, say, government relief of the unemployed had much greater appeal in the 1930s than in the 1870s, they did so at least in part because the typical worker in the 1930s faced a much greater risk of unemployment. 331 00:48:03.440 --> 00:48:09.520 of Unemployment, and its attendant loss of income. 332 00:48:09.520 --> 00:48:14.560 Similar observations might be made about any number of other changes in the social structure. 333 00:48:14.560 --> 00:48:21.360 For example, population aging, diminished coherence of the extended family, more frequent 334 00:48:21.360 --> 00:48:24.320 divorce and so forth. 335 00:48:24.320 --> 00:48:30.160 All tended to make government provision of a so-called social safety net appear more 336 00:48:30.160 --> 00:48:36.260 are attractive relative to individual or family self-reliance. 337 00:48:36.260 --> 00:48:42.760 It seems extremely unlikely that people whose life situations had changed so radically would 338 00:48:42.760 --> 00:48:47.360 have maintained all their old ideological convictions. 339 00:48:47.360 --> 00:48:55.680 To cite Mises again, the common man does choose and he is ready to change his ideology and 340 00:48:55.680 --> 00:49:01.580 and consequently his mode of action whenever he becomes convinced that this would better 341 00:49:01.580 --> 00:49:06.840 serve his own interests." 342 00:49:06.840 --> 00:49:12.320 If people in the late 19th and early 20th centuries gradually came to look more favorably 343 00:49:12.320 --> 00:49:20.100 on government promises to deliver social security, they did not do so solely because socialist 344 00:49:20.100 --> 00:49:38.100 The people's ideas grew more plausible and enticing as the people's typical socioeconomic condition changed. 345 00:49:38.100 --> 00:49:55.580 So, I've completed my categorization here, which is a tentative one, and I have several 346 00:49:55.580 --> 00:50:04.660 question marks and some of the names, I originally put myself all alone down in the lower right 347 00:50:04.660 --> 00:50:13.220 Hand Cell, but I feel much better after having discovered in Mises passages which I believe 348 00:50:13.220 --> 00:50:18.660 entitle me to at least tentatively place him alongside me there, I certainly feel much 349 00:50:18.660 --> 00:50:46.200 I can conclude quickly now. 350 00:50:46.200 --> 00:50:53.500 In determining the course of socioeconomic and political change, nothing has greater 351 00:50:53.500 --> 00:50:56.560 importance than the dominant ideology. 352 00:50:56.560 --> 00:51:01.480 Unfortunately, our understanding of this critical variable, especially our understanding of 353 00:51:01.480 --> 00:51:06.720 how it changes over time, remains extremely primitive. 354 00:51:06.720 --> 00:51:12.120 Despite the efforts of some of the finest minds in the human sciences, perhaps this 355 00:51:12.120 --> 00:51:15.920 situation cannot be remedied. 356 00:51:15.920 --> 00:51:22.560 She remains a deeply contested concept, and no matter whose conceptualization we adopt, 357 00:51:22.560 --> 00:51:28.920 we still cannot measure it in a way that permits us to trace its precise ups and downs. 358 00:51:28.920 --> 00:51:33.960 Although we can, I believe, make defensible general statements about the character and 359 00:51:33.960 --> 00:51:40.640 pace of ideological change at a specific time and place, such statements themselves will 360 00:51:40.640 --> 00:51:42.760 surely attract critics. 361 00:51:42.760 --> 00:52:00.760 I've got a friend who's a leading figure in something called fuzzy logic, and I defer to his superior knowledge of mathematics and engineering, but I have serious doubts that fuzzy sociology of knowledge holds great promise. 362 00:52:00.760 --> 00:52:30.760 This little schematic I've put up here by the way is an attempt to compress what I've been talking about into a visual representation and I sometimes sit and stare at it for an hour at a time wondering what it means and wondering whether something that it seems to mean is wrong 363 00:52:30.760 --> 00:52:39.760 And perhaps you'll find similar inspiration if you dwell on it for a while. 364 00:52:39.760 --> 00:52:45.760 Unfortunately, we have little alternative to pushing on. 365 00:52:45.760 --> 00:52:51.760 If the sociology of knowledge did not exist, we would be compelled to invent it. 366 00:52:51.760 --> 00:52:56.760 Because beliefs are fundamental to action. 367 00:52:56.760 --> 00:53:07.760 Belief systems of the sort we call ideology pervade the world of political action and hence fundamentally affect the character of the economic order. 368 00:53:07.760 --> 00:53:15.760 And the reciprocal relationship of social structure and social thought seems undeniable. 369 00:53:15.760 --> 00:53:22.760 Perhaps we'll have to settle for an understanding that falls well short of a general theory, 370 00:53:22.760 --> 00:53:30.260 relying instead on an accumulation of careful case studies of specific historical experiences 371 00:53:30.260 --> 00:53:33.760 and hoping to identify recurrent patterns. 372 00:53:33.760 --> 00:53:42.260 Moreover, no matter how grandly we frame our theory, we'll have to allow for a large measure of stochastic shock. 373 00:53:42.260 --> 00:53:49.760 That is, we'll have to concede that in the context of human creativity and free will, 374 00:53:49.760 --> 00:53:57.440 Well, no theory of ideological change can ever be fully deterministic. 375 00:53:57.440 --> 00:54:03.360 Notwithstanding all these difficulties, some progress, I think, may be made, and perhaps 376 00:54:03.360 --> 00:54:07.800 one of you in the audience will be the one to take the next step. 377 00:54:07.800 --> 00:54:14.800 Thank you very much. 378 00:54:37.800 --> 00:55:03.800 I'm not saying about radical change based on ideology alone, people like us, but some crisis motivates us, but that when the crisis comes, how these institutions respond to the crisis depends on how they've been ideologically depressed in the most quantitative ways, depending on what the ideology is, the ideology is sort of waiting there, being pushed by the fanatics, until the time comes. 379 00:55:03.800 --> 00:55:16.800 People said a certain thing about the American Revolution, that the idea of Revolution 1 didn't really come along until conditions got bad enough, given what the British were doing, that they really didn't break. 380 00:55:16.800 --> 00:55:24.800 But when things did get bad, the idea of what they should do was influenced by Lockean ideology and so on. 381 00:55:24.800 --> 00:55:34.800 The good news here, you might think this is bad news, but the good news is in terms of foreign policy. 382 00:55:34.800 --> 00:55:45.800 People say radical Islamic ideas out there are, you know, people hold them, lots and lots of people in the Muslim world are sympathetic to this, 383 00:55:45.800 --> 00:55:47.800 The Theory of Money and Credit 384 00:56:15.800 --> 00:56:37.800 Well, that's very much what I was trying to say with my discussion of the softening up phase during normal periods. 385 00:56:37.800 --> 00:56:50.800 Often, there are any number of distinct ideologies being espoused at any given time, and of course, only one can be dominant at any given time. 386 00:56:50.800 --> 00:57:00.800 And generally, the dominant ideology remains dominant over an extended period, otherwise we would never recognize it in the first place. 387 00:57:00.800 --> 00:57:19.800 One only thing I might want to add to what you said, Roderick, is that during these normal stretches, there is a dominant ideology, so people are adhering to an ideology already, and the crisis is the potential trigger for ideological shift or change. 388 00:57:19.800 --> 00:57:31.600 and it will serve as a trigger to the extent that the events of the crisis discredit the dominant ideology. 389 00:57:31.600 --> 00:57:39.800 Not every kind of crisis serves equally well to discredit the existing ideology. 390 00:57:39.800 --> 00:57:48.800 If one looks back at the 1930s, the Great Depression was tailor-made to discredit classical liberalism 391 00:57:48.800 --> 00:58:17.800 because this just didn't seem to fit, you know, we'd always thought markets worked tolerably well, they didn't just break down and the interpretation people gave to the events of the Great Depression was of course not that a series of government policy blunders all thrown together had brought about this catastrophe, but that the market had broken down. 392 00:58:17.800 --> 00:58:28.800 The market used to work and now look at it. We've got crops rotting in the fields and people who want to work who can't get jobs and all the rest of it. 393 00:58:28.800 --> 00:58:35.800 They couldn't make any sense of it within their normal way of making sense of the world and so they said that's no good. 394 00:58:35.800 --> 00:58:41.800 We've got to have some better way to think about and organize the world. 395 00:58:41.800 --> 00:58:54.800 And at that point, of course, all the radicals who had been out there cultivating with little success for decades were in a position to sell their wares more successfully. 396 00:58:54.800 --> 00:59:02.800 And of course, in some countries, they sold them all too successfully, and horrible changes took place. 397 00:59:02.800 --> 00:59:17.800 In this country, just moderately horrible changes took place, but nonetheless, it's hard to envision the New Deal without some extremely serious crisis. 398 00:59:17.800 --> 00:59:44.800 Also, when you say that the crisis of 1893, certainly, we like to talk about the Great Freshmen, did the crisis of 1893 have a softening up effect as well? I know that right afterwards the Democrats pretty much abandoned their philosophy of individualism, whatever, and went to Wig James Bryan and ran a very radical campaign. 399 00:59:44.800 --> 00:59:55.800 Well, I think that those events, the business depression of the 1890s was the second worst of American history. 400 00:59:55.800 --> 01:00:03.800 It went on for five or six years to some extent and it had a substantial ideological effect. 401 01:00:03.800 --> 01:00:13.800 I don't think it was on the scale of the effect of the 1930s depression, but it did begin to make some people rethink their positions. 402 01:00:13.800 --> 01:00:21.440 positions, and particularly the opinion leading classes. 403 01:00:21.440 --> 01:00:26.540 It affected more than it affected the masses. 404 01:00:26.540 --> 01:00:33.240 To say that classical liberalism or something akin to it was dominant in the 19th century 405 01:00:33.240 --> 01:00:39.340 for the most part does not mean that there weren't other views afoot, even other views 406 01:00:39.340 --> 01:00:59.340 There were always competing views that were more or less goofy, radical in some way, greenbackism, prohibitionism, you name it. 407 01:00:59.340 --> 01:01:07.340 There were all kinds of crazy ideological proposals being floated throughout the 19th century. 408 01:01:07.340 --> 01:01:08.340 Theory. 409 01:01:08.340 --> 01:01:14.060 So there were already some people among even the working classes in the 1890s who were 410 01:01:14.060 --> 01:01:20.620 quite prepared to have government nationalize the railroads and the banks and print up a 411 01:01:20.620 --> 01:01:23.780 lot of paper money and so forth. 412 01:01:23.780 --> 01:01:31.740 And that's where the populace got quite a bit of support in the 1880s and 90s. 413 01:01:31.740 --> 01:01:38.500 But none the less, most even of the working masses of the United States were pretty level 414 01:01:38.500 --> 01:01:43.580 headed about, you know, the markets, you know, it's working pretty well for people. 415 01:01:43.580 --> 01:01:48.380 I think they didn't have any real revolutionary bone to pick with it. 416 01:01:48.380 --> 01:01:57.660 The famous book by Werner Sombart, Why Is There No Socialism in the United States? 417 01:01:57.660 --> 01:02:05.580 And Sombart's conclusion was that the answer was roast beef and apple pie. 418 01:02:05.580 --> 01:02:10.820 Most working people were level-headed enough to look around and say, look, things are pretty 419 01:02:10.820 --> 01:02:11.820 good actually. 420 01:02:11.820 --> 01:02:16.660 And if they had come from Europe, they knew very well that things were better than they 421 01:02:16.660 --> 01:02:23.900 had been, chances are, and they were better than their relatives back home had it. 422 01:02:23.900 --> 01:02:32.220 And so they didn't fall for socialist proposals or they weren't much influenced by socialist 423 01:02:32.220 --> 01:02:37.880 ideas, but nonetheless some people were. 424 01:02:37.880 --> 01:02:43.980 So these things are always out there to some degree and they probably gained a little bit 425 01:02:43.980 --> 01:02:45.500 in the 1890s. 426 01:02:45.500 --> 01:02:55.440 Now when prosperity returned in the late 90s, most of that was given up and the opinion 427 01:02:55.440 --> 01:02:58.440 leaders were the ones that took a permanent lesson from it. 428 01:02:58.440 --> 01:03:04.760 And some of the business schemers who started thinking more actively about how to cartelize 429 01:03:04.760 --> 01:03:11.120 to prevent the kinds of losses that they had experienced during the 1890s depression. 430 01:03:11.120 --> 01:03:26.120 That is, for example, the origin of the scheming that led to the Federal Reserve system, the financial difficulties of the 1890s. 431 01:03:26.120 --> 01:03:34.120 We've been hearing a theory of ideological change in the media ad nauseam, which is that 9-11 changed everything. 432 01:03:34.120 --> 01:03:56.120 And since I know that you're such a fan of neoconservative thought, I was wondering if maybe you could talk about where their theory fits into your scheme, their theory of ideological change, and then what you think really happened in 9-11 in regards to the ideological change. 433 01:04:04.120 --> 01:04:26.120 In spirit, more or less Trotskyite, it seems sometimes that they have the belief that you can change ideology at the point of a gun, that you can bomb people into ideological change, and raw force can be brought to bear, 434 01:04:26.120 --> 01:04:36.120 And people can be shown the error of believing anything other than what they're told to believe by the invading armed forces. 435 01:04:36.120 --> 01:04:45.120 What can you say about such impoverished thinking? 436 01:04:45.120 --> 01:04:48.120 But in regards to the change in America? 437 01:04:48.120 --> 01:04:53.120 Well, I think that 9-11 changed everything. 438 01:04:53.120 --> 01:05:05.120 Everything is just a political slogan to try to dress up and apologize for some of the actions the ruling clique has taken since 9-11. 439 01:05:05.120 --> 01:05:14.120 They tell us it changed everything as a part of their argument for getting us to accept changes they want to impose on us, 440 01:05:14.120 --> 01:05:21.120 although 9-11, in my view, changed nothing. It's just a big criminal act and it changed nothing. 441 01:05:21.120 --> 01:05:44.120 The thing that was important about it is that it put people in a frame of mind where they were insecure and uncertain in a way that allowed them to tolerate the changes that the ruling clique then proceeded to impose on the country. 442 01:05:44.120 --> 01:05:53.120 And here, as often, and to some extent in every crisis, fear is a driving emotion. 443 01:05:53.120 --> 01:05:58.120 Fear is at the root of these changes in mass thinking every time. 444 01:05:58.120 --> 01:06:02.120 It is the ruling passion. 445 01:06:02.120 --> 01:06:13.120 And no matter how much people are driven by love or envy or other root emotions, nothing, nothing, nothing works like fear. 446 01:06:13.120 --> 01:06:22.120 Fear will dominate every other passion that people have, and that's why politicians exploit it so ruthlessly. 447 01:06:22.120 --> 01:06:25.120 On that happy note, we'll break for lunch.