It's an honor for me to have been invited to deliver the Hayek Memorial Lecture here this year.
Frederic Hayek was a most important figure in the development of my own thinking,
and even more importantly, Hayek was the gate through which I entered the wonderful world of classical liberalism and libertarianism
He opened a gate that led me eventually to Mises and Rothbard and many others, some of whom are here today in this room.
The past 35 years would have been totally different had I never encountered Hayek.
Hayek.
So I feel I owe a great debt to him and I've continued to study his work ever since I first
encountered it in the late 1960s and I feel I've received a great benefit from it.
I don't count myself a disciple of Hayek's exactly and there are a number of points on
I want to talk to you about the complex course of ideological change.
And this is a subject I've dealt with in the past at various times and I want to revisit what I've done before and see if I can possibly push out a little farther than I have.
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.
In studying the growth of government, I had become convinced that ideological change had played a critical role in propelling that growth.
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.
Yet most economists, and some other analysts as well, convinced by Mansur Olson's pioneering analysis of collective action,
seemed to find such collective action paradoxical.
In the light of Olson's analysis, the historical actors appeared to have behaved irrationally,
and social scientists have little, if anything, to say about irrational action.
Beyond mere descriptions of what has been called the extraordinary popular delusions and the madness of crowds,
what systematic account can anyone give of actions that make no sense?
As I developed my own thinking about ideology, I came to an understanding in which ideologically motivated action
can be seen as no less rational than the kinds of actions that economists routinely explain by appealing to so-called material self-interest.
In the light of this understanding, I developed consistent explanations of various sorts of collective action, including those that had played crucial roles in bringing about the modern growth of government.
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.
Moreover, in this view, any shrinkage of the enormous governments that had come into existence by the middle of the 20th century
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 and most American opinion leaders as late as the 1880s and 1890s
with its emphasis on individualism, steadfast private property rights and limited government.
On the question of ideological change, however, I had reached few satisfying answers.
In my account of changes in politico-economic institutions, I had resigned myself for the most part to treating ideological change as exogenous.
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
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.
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.
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.
Today, I'm reviewing elements of my previous analysis of ideology. I'll discuss further some important aspects of ideological change,
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.
I'll talk now about what ideology is and how it works. Ideology is a vigorously contested concept.
All scholars agree, however, that it is not synonymous with just any idea or set of ideas.
Although ideas serve as its elements, an ideology consists of certain kinds of ideas spanning a particular realm of reference.
In my conceptualization, it denotes a somewhat coherent, rather comprehensive belief system about social relations.
To say that it is somewhat coherent implies that its components hang together, though not necessarily in a way that would satisfy a logician.
To say that it is rather comprehensive implies that it subsumes a wide variety of social categories and their interrelations.
Notwithstanding its extensive scope, it tends to revolve about only a few central values, such as individual freedom, social equality, or national glory.
Ideology has four distinct aspects. Cognitive, moral, programmatic, and solidary.
and.
Moral Assessments, as a committed member of a political action group in pursuit of definite social objectives.
Ideologies perform an important psychological service, because without them people cannot know, assess and respond to much of the vast world of social relations.
Ideology simplifies a reality too huge and complicated to be comprehended, evaluated and dealt with in any purely factual, scientific or other disinterested way.
Every sane adult, unless he is completely apathetic politically, has an ideology.
The notion that ideology is only the distorted fanatical thought of one's intellectual or political opponents cannot be sustained.
Although some maintain precisely that view of ideology.
Of course, every ideology must deal in part with factual, scientific and other hard knowledge.
and to the extent that it makes assumptions or claims inconsistent with such well-confirmed
socially tested knowledge, we may properly accuse it of distortion.
Nevertheless, all ideologies contain unverified elements, some of which, including their fundamental
commitments to certain values, are unverifiable.
In relation to these elements, which are neither true nor false, the allegation of distortion
has little or no meaning.
As Thomas K. Merton once exclaimed, on what grounds may one attribute or refuse validity
to ethical norms?
If someone believes that the protection of individual freedom, the enforcement of social
Social equality or the attainment of national glory should be the paramount objective of socio-political action.
No empirical test can falsify that conviction.
Most hypotheses about the sources of ideological commitment are either interest theories or strain theories.
In interest theories, people are assumed to pursue wealth or power, and ideologies serve
as weapons in the struggle by lending legitimacy to their pursuits.
In strain theories, people are assumed to flee from socioeconomic anxieties, and ideologies
bring them comfort and fellowship.
Recall that ideology has four aspects, cognitive, moral, programmatic and solidary.
If it had only the first three, we would have no grounds for identifying it as a basis of
rational participation in large group politics.
In that event, ideology would allow one to perceive and interpret the social world, to
impose moral valuations on it, and to conclude that certain political positions or movements
deserve support. Yet one would lack a personal incentive to take any political action, because,
as Olson explained, it would be rational to free ride. To join rationally in political
action in a large group context, one must expect a benefit that is contingent on one's
Solidarity, the fourth aspect of ideology, is such a contingent benefit by virtue of
its important connection with the maintenance of personal identity.
People acquire and sustain their personal identities within groups by their interaction
with Other Members, first in families, then in various primary and secondary reference
groups.
The kind of groups to which a person chooses to belong is closely connected with the kind
of person he takes himself to be, a prime concern to the typical individual.
People crave the comfort of association with those they recognize as their own kind.
In the absence of such community membership and involvement in the group's common purposes,
people tend to feel alienated and depressed.
Aristotle wasn't joking when he described man as a social animal.
By internalizing the values and precepts of their communities of shared belief, people
People 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.
Yet such action is completely rational. 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.
The truth, as Samuel Bowles has succinctly expressed it, is that, quote,
people act politically both to get things and to be someone.
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.
Expressive motivations surely play a much greater role than the classical economic theories of politics have recognized.
Hence, many people routinely participate in such large group political actions as voting or giving money or personal services to political pressure groups.
Groups, and they episodically join in mass endeavors to alter society on a grand scale,
sometimes even in violent and risky attempts to overthrow the government.
They take these actions not because they are irrational, but because their self-perceived
identities are at stake.
Not by accident do activists try to shame holdouts by asking rhetorically, what kind
By acting in concert with others who embrace the same ideology, people enjoy a solidarity
essential to the maintenance of their identities.
They cannot receive this form of utility without acting.
There is no closet solidarity.
Or in Brennan and Lomasky's terminology, no expressive utility without actual expression.
To behave differently, a person would have to be different, and being different would
require the internalization of a different ideology.
Ideologies give rise to the personal-political complex of identity, solidarity, and political
Ideological Action in large part because of their inherent moral content.
Ultimately many political actors treat the choice between right and wrong as more fundamental
than the choices they view as purely instrumental.
I want to turn now to theories of ideological change.
I'll introduce some simple terminology to help us analyze how ideologies change, and
my basic categories of ideological change will distinguish whether it is temporally
Steady or Irregular, and whether it is causally theory-driven or event-driven.
The timing category is straightforward and refers to the pace at which ideological change
takes place, distinguishing even change from erratic change.
Many discussions of ideological change presume the former, as if an ideology by its very
Nature had a sort of inertia that keeps it from ever changing abruptly. Hence, ideological
gradual change is the only kind possible in obedience, as it were, to the motto on the
title page of Alfred Marshall's Principles of Economics. Recall that, natura non facit
Saltem or Nature Does Not Make Jumps, Irregular Ideological Change in contrast denotes a process
in which ideology may change slowly or not at all for a while, then more quickly, even
abruptly in a relatively brief episode, perhaps as a result of a great social upheaval such
such as war, revolution, or economic collapse.
My causal categories pertain to the way in which an ideological change spreads from its
original source to penetrate the mass public or a substantial segment of it.
In one conception of this transit, which I call theory-driven, it consists of a conveyance
runs through successive types of actors who contribute to the process of dissemination.
This form of transmission often traces the locus of adoption from a great thinker, which
I put in capital letters, a great thinker to the relatively small but articulate group
of intellectuals Hayek labeled the second-hand dealers and ideas, thence to a larger group
Group of Community Opinion Leaders, and ultimately to a much larger group of ordinary recipients
who embrace the new or revamped ideology.
Probably the most famous expression of a theory-driven model of ideological change appears in the
final paragraph of John Maynard Keynes' General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money.
The Ideas of Economists and Political Philosophers, both when they are right and when they are
wrong, are more powerful than is commonly understood.
Indeed, the world is ruled by little else.
Practical men who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influences
are usually the slaves of some defunct economist.
Mad men in authority who hear voices in the air are distilling their frenzy from some
academic scribbler of a few years back.
I am sure that the power of vested interest 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 their
twenty-five or thirty 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.
Soon or late, it is ideas, not vested interests, which are dangerous or good or evil.
Hayek could scarcely have agreed more.
Indeed, in a 1949 article titled The Intellectuals and Socialism in the University of Chicago
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.
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.
No government, whether democratic or dictatorial, can free itself from the sway of generally accepted ideology.
Moreover, in certain passages, Mises maintained the theory-driven view of ideological change in extraordinarily strong form.
Quote, only very few men, he declared, have the gift of thinking new and original ideas and of changing the traditional body of creeds and doctrines.
Hayek had the good fortune to become the eponym for what Milton Friedman and Rose Friedman have described as a long ideological wave beginning in the latter part of the 20th century in which the Friedmans perceived that a Fabian tide of interventionism gave way to a Hayekian tide of opposition to central planning and support for greater economic function.
and Freedom.
Thus, Hayek not only argued in favor of the theory-driven model of ideological change
in its great thinker variant, but according to the Friedmans embodied it as well.
And just parenthetically, I think we may wonder whether the arguably more influential Milton
Friedman was only being modest by naming this alleged phenomenon after Hayek rather than
himself.
Theory-driven ideological change flows, as it were, straight downhill from an exalted
origin in the pronouncements of a great thinker, often expressed in a big book such as The
The Wealth of Nations, Das Kapital, or the General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money
via one or more intermediary groups of intellectually less illustrious disseminators and on down to the masses
who it seems scarcely have an independent thought, but absorb or not whatever washes over them from above.
As Hayek put it, 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.
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, to exaggerate the importance of theoretical thought in society and history is a natural failing of theorizers.
We are well advised to inquire into whether ideological change may have other sources as well, and if it does, into how such sources are related to the contributions that great thinkers unquestionably make to the process.
I want to speak now for a while about ideology and social structure.
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.
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
Not much investigation is required to discover that many scholars, even entire disciplines, have disputed what I'm calling the theory-driven model.
The sociology of knowledge, a field that took shape largely in Germany and France in the 1920s and 1930s,
though its inner-war practitioners had much earlier precursors,
defines its domain as the relations between social structure and social thought.
Perhaps the most influential pioneer was Carl Mannheim, whose best known work is Ideology and Utopia.
The acknowledged modern giant in this field is Columbia University sociologist Robert K. Merton, who died in 2003 after a long life and long career.
He was best known for his contributions to the sociology of science, although his writings and influence ranged widely.
Unfortunately, many writers in this field have taken too seriously what Karl Marx had to say about the subject.
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.
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.
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.
Hence, as technology and property relations change, ideology, along with everything else in the superstructure, changes accordingly.
Lewis Kozer points out that in their later writings, Marx and Engels, quote,
granted a certain degree of intrinsic autonomy to the development of legal, political, religious, literary and artistic ideas
and allowed that the intellectual superstructure of society was not simply a reflection of the infrastructure,
but rather could in turn react upon it.
Mises naturally disagreed with Marx about the event-driven model, as he disagreed in virtually every other regard,
and he expressed his disagreement in the form of an adamant denial that social structure affects ideology at all.
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.
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.
In a broader sense, however, the proposition that an individual's personal experiences and his social circumstances condition to some degree his ideological conceptions seems to me almost self-evident and to accord with a great deal of empirical evidence.
Therefore, I maintain that we can deny the extreme Marxian proposition without throwing away the sociology of knowledge completely.
And I'll add parenthetically that Mises' own statements in other passages seem to accept the proposition I'm asserting here.
Mises maintained only that such environmental features of human action lay outside praxeology within the bounds of historical study.
Among the most instructive modern writers in the sociology of knowledge, Berger and Luckman develop a multitude of ideas in sensible fashion.
in their 1966 book, The Social Construction of Reality, a treatise in the sociology of knowledge.
They insist that the relationship between ideas and their sustaining social processes is always a dialectical one.
Expanding on this idea, they write as follows.
Theories are concocted in order to legitimate already existing social institutions.
But it also happens that social institutions are changed in order to bring them into conformity
with already existing theories.
That is, to make them more legitimate.
The experts in legitimation may operate as theoretical justifiers of the status quo.
They may also appear as revolutionary ideologists.
Definitions of reality have self-fulfilling potency.
These can be realized in history, even theories that were highly abstruse when they were first
conceived by their inventors.
Consequently, social change must always be understood as standing in a dialectical relationship
to the history of ideas.
Both idealistic and materialistic understandings of the relationship overlook this dialectic
and thus, Distort History, end of quote.
The sociology of knowledge counsels us to take account of how people's concrete experiences
of life, with all the peculiarities specific to a particular time and place, may shape
their beliefs about social relations, perhaps in ways that are more or less independent
of the products of great thinkers and the efforts of those who disseminate their theories.
Here everyday life comes to play a potentially important role for both elites and masses.
I'll speak now about the influence of events on ideological change.
If Burton Folsom is correct to have written that, quote, rarely do people convert by reading
tracks or listening to theories, and if events as such can affect whether individuals embrace
or Reject in Ideology, then another source of ideological change exists besides the theories
that percolate down from great thinkers to the masses.
Of course, events, no matter how earth-shaking they may be, do not interpret themselves in
ideological terms.
So when we speak of the influence of events on ideological change, we mean something qualitatively
are very different from the influence of articulated ideas that intellectuals employ to express a belief system about social relations.
We refer much more to acceptance or rejection, especially among the masses, than to formulation de novo.
To appreciate how events come into play we need to recognize that in any modern society, except perhaps a totalitarian society,
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 winning a prize.
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.
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
and Societal Ascendancy if the loosely anchored persons can be pulled over.
In this quest, ideologues may labor diligently for years hoping to win converts little by
little or to prepare them to soften them up as it were.
and anticipation of opportunities to bring them over that may emerge in a future crisis.
This softening up aspect of ideological endeavor may have great importance, even though it
seems completely futile during the normal stretches of social life, when social, economic,
political and ideological relations change slowly, because when the crisis does arrive,
This advent creates extraordinary potential for ideological shakeup.
Crisis by its very nature creates heightened insecurities and in extreme cases widespread
bewilderment among the populace.
War, revolution, economic collapse, runaway inflation, extreme domestic disorder all create
new fears and all tend to discredit established beliefs and to open new possibilities for
the successful propagation of novel understandings, evaluations and political programs.
After all, whatever the claims that sustain the old order, social arrangements will now
be seen as manifestly not working any longer in critical respects. Supporters of the established
order tremble in the face of such adverse, perplexing, but undeniable events. Some devotees
of orthodoxy lose heart and some abandon their old ideology and embrace a competing oneivid.
Recall as an outstanding example how many people, both intellectuals and ordinary persons,
forsook classical liberalism and took up some species of collectivism during the Great Depression.
Even many people who should have known better.
I'll name no names here.
Precisely such crisis conditions prevailed when, in 1935, Keynes wrote the passage I
I quoted earlier about the potency of ideas.
With regard to the prospects for adoption of the measures he tried to justify in his
book he wrote, at the present time people are unusually expectant of a more fundamental
diagnosis, more particularly ready to receive it, eager to try it out if it should be even
Unplausible."
Keynes seemed to sense the same increased public receptivity to new ideas and new programs
that Franklin Roosevelt perceived at the trough of the Great Depression.
When he declared in a campaign speech, the country needs, and unless I mistake its temper,
the country demands bold, persistent experimentation.
It is common sense to take a method and try it.
If it fails, admit it frankly and try another, but above all, try something.
Only in a crisis, when previously established convictions have been thrown into doubt, can
such blind and ignorant flailing about strike many people as well-advised policy-makers.
Of course, the Roosevelt administration did not seek to try just anything, and such political
predisposition is what brings ideological preconditions to the fore.
Certain economic theorists like to repeat the old saying, you can't beat something
with nothing.
By that quip, they mean that an existing theory's inability to explain certain events is not
not enough to discredit it. One must replace it with a more compelling theory. Thomas Kuhns
argued that the same thing may be said of the sciences. The same thing may be said of
ideological change. No matter how frightened and bewildered people are, no matter how terribly
In this light, we see the importance of the softening up phase, when hopeful ideologues
cultivate public opinion and prepare it to receive and germinate their brand of seed
when the season is propitious.
Persuading people to believe a completely novel set of ideas is much more difficult
than edging a great many confused and fearful individuals over the line.
That line itself having been drawn over a period of years or perhaps even decades of
patient effort by missionaries with their voices crying out in the wilderness warning
Crisis, however, is not the only occasion when events influence the course of ideological
change.
Although the events characterized as socio-economic trends may not be so dramatic, they operate
relentlessly and cumulatively and hence over a long period they may bring about a substantial
shift in the ideological center of gravity.
The broad societal transformations that we summarize by terms such as industrialization,
Urbanization, Domestic and International Migration, the aging of the population, and so forth, bring about changes in social structure, that is the composite of social roles being played by persons in the various segments of the population.
As the social structure changes, the relative representation in the population changes for persons living in the different socio-economic contexts.
In the face of these transformations, we are well advised to consider that, as Thorsten Vedlen wrote,
the scheme of thought or of knowledge is in good part a reverberation of the schemes of life.
Or in Mises' words, except for the very few who are capable of original thought, a person's, quote, ideology is what his environment enjoins upon him.
For example, whereas the average American worker in the late 1870s worked on a farm and many people in agriculture and elsewhere were self-employed,
The great majority of workers in the 1930s were occupied in urban manufacturing, commercial and service occupations as wage and salary earners.
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 and its attendant loss of income.
Similar observations might be made about any number of other changes in the social structure.
For example, population aging, diminished coherence of the extended family, more frequent divorce, and so forth.
All tended to make government provision of a so-called social safety net appear more attractive relative to individual or family self-reliance.
It seems extremely unlikely that people whose life situations had changed so radically would have maintained all their old ideological convictions.
To cite Mises again, the common man does choose, and he is ready to change his ideology, and consequently his mode of action, whenever he becomes convinced that this would better serve his own interests.
If people in the late 19th and early 20th centuries gradually came to look more favorably on government promises to deliver social security, they did not do so solely because socialist writers and second-hand dealers in ideas had become more successful in persuading them, but also to some extent because such ideas grew more plausible and enticing as the people
and the People's Typical Socio-Economic Condition Change.
I've completed my categorization here, which is a tentative one, and I have several question marks and some of the names.
I originally put myself all alone down in the lower right hand cell, but I feel much better after having discovered in Mises passages which I believe entitle me to at least tentatively place him alongside me there, I certainly feel much stronger having his assistance.
I can conclude quickly now.
In determining the course of socio-economic and political change, nothing has greater
importance than the dominant ideology.
Unfortunately, our understanding of this critical variable, especially our understanding of how it changes over time, remains extremely primitive.
Despite the efforts of some of the finest minds in the human sciences, perhaps this situation cannot be remedied.
Ideology remains a deeply contested concept, and no matter whose conceptualization we adopt, we still cannot measure it in a way that permits us to trace its precise ups and downs.
Although we can, I believe, make defensible general statements about the character and pace of ideological change at a specific time and place, such statements themselves will surely attract critics.
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.
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.
And perhaps you'll find similar inspiration if you dwell on it for a while.
Unfortunately, we have little alternative to pushing on.
If the sociology of knowledge did not exist, we would be compelled to invent it.
Because beliefs are fundamental to action.
Belief systems of the sort we call ideology pervade the world of political action and hence fundamentally affect the character of the economic order.
And the reciprocal relationship of social structure and social thought seems undeniable.
Perhaps we'll have to settle for an understanding that falls well short of a general theory, relying instead on an accumulation of careful case studies of specific historical experiences, and hoping to identify recurrent patterns.
Moreover, no matter how grandly we frame our theory, we'll have to allow for a large measure of stochastic shock.
That is, we'll have to concede that in the context of human creativity and free will, no theory of ideological change can ever be fully deterministic.
Not withstanding all these difficulties, some progress, I think, may be made, and perhaps one of you in the audience will be the one to take the next step.
Thank you very much.
Take a few questions, Roger.
I can't remember whose theory this is, but I recall running across a theory that suggests that the relationship between ideology and events would go like this, that in the absence of crisis, only a handful of fanatics were willing to bring about radical change based on ideology alone.
People like us, but most of us have some crisis to motivate them, but when the crisis comes, how they can respond to the crisis depends on how they've been ideologically trapped in a lot of different ways, depending on what the ideology is.
The ideology is sort of waiting there, being pushed by the fanatics, until the time comes.
People have said this sort of thing about Human Action and Evolution, that the idea of revolution wasn't really come along until conditions got bad enough, given what the British were doing, that they were really right.
But when things did get bad, the idea of what they should do was influenced by Machiavelli's ideology and so on.
The good news here, I mean, you might think this is bad news, and it was just, you know, we were able to sort of convert by the way without losing the right to the question.
But the good news is we look at this in terms of foreign policy. People say, we're looking at these radical Islamic ideas out there are, um, you know,
lots and lots of people hold them, lots and lots of people in the Muslim world are sympathetic to this, all of them are Muslims, it's a terrible thing.
But even if that's true, I mean, yeah, I'm not a Christian over that, but we're not, even if that's true,
Even if most people in the world, even if most of them were sympathetic to zideology, most of them wouldn't actually do anything unless they perceived them for a crisis.
So if we were not providing them with crises, which some of the lobby theories are a plausible ideological framework for interpreting them, you might have some people sort of grumbling.
Well, that's very much what I was trying to say with my discussion of the softening up phase during normal periods.
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 and generally the dominant ideology remains dominant over an extended period otherwise we would never recognize it in the first place but 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
The Great Depression was tailor made to serve as a trigger for ideological shift or change.
It will serve as a trigger to the extent that the events of the crisis discredit the dominant ideology.
Not every kind of crisis serves equally well to discredit the existing ideology.
If one looks back at the 1930s, the Great Depression was tailor-made to discredit classical liberalism, because this just didn't seem to fit.
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, that 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, they couldn't make any sense of it within
The Theory of Money and Credit
The crisis of 1893, certainly, we like to talk about the Great Depression, did the crisis of 1893
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 Weigel's. Brian ran a very radical campaign.
and it had a substantial ideological effect.
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
and particularly the opinion-leading classes.
It affected more than it affected the masses.
To say that classical liberalism or something akin to it was dominant in the 19th century for the most part does not mean that there weren't other views afoot, even other views that were fairly widely accepted.
There were always competing views that were more or less goofy, radical in some way, greenbackism, prohibitionism, you name it.
There were all kinds of crazy ideological proposals being floated throughout the 19th century.
century. So there were already some people among even the working classes in the 1890s
who were quite prepared to have government nationalize the railroads and the banks and
print up a lot of paper money and so forth. And that's where the populace got quite a
bit of support in the 1880s and 90s. But nonetheless, most even of the working masses of the United
in the United States were pretty level-headed about, you know, the markets, you know, it's
working pretty well for people. I think they didn't have any real revolutionary bone to
pick with it. The famous book by Werner Sombart, Why Is There No Socialism in the United States?
And Sombart's conclusion was that the answer was roast beef and apple pie.
Most working people were level-headed enough to look around and say, look, things are pretty
good actually.
And if they'd come from Europe, they knew very well that things were better than they
had been, chances are, and they were better than their relatives back home had it.
And so they didn't fall for socialist proposals, or they weren't much influenced by socialist
ideas, but nonetheless some people were.
So these things are always out there to some degree, and they probably gained a little
bit in the 1890s.
Now, when prosperity returned in the late 90s, most of that was given up and the opinion
leaders were the ones that took a permanent lesson from it.
And some of the business schemers who started thinking more actively about how to cartelize
to prevent the kinds of losses that they had experienced during the 1890s depression.
So that is, for example, the origin of the scheming that led to the Federal Reserve system,
is the financial difficulties of the 1890s.
We've been hearing a theory of ideological change in the media ad nauseam, which is that
9-11 changed everything, and since I know that you're such a fan of neoconservative
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 ideological change.
Well, the neocons are, if not in person, 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, you know, can be brought
But in regards to the change in America, is there any psychological change sparked by the 9-11?
I think that 9-11 changed 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.
They tell us it changed everything as a part of their argument for getting us to accept changes they want to impose on us, although 9-11 in my view changed nothing.
It's just a big criminal act and it changed nothing.
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.
Here, as often, and to some extent in every crisis, fear is a driving emotion.
Fear is at the root of these changes in mass thinking every time.
It is the ruling passion.
No matter how much people are driven by love or envy or other root emotions, nothing works
like fear.
Here will dominate every other passion that people have and that's why politicians exploit
it so ruthlessly.
On that happy note, we'll break for lunch.