The Ludwig von Mises Institute presents The Libertarian Tradition, an audio series with Jeff Rigenbach.
As we all know, massive rebellions against duly constituted authority, we refer to them today as the Civil Rights Movement,
movement, the anti-draft and anti-Vietnam war movements, and the counterculture swept
through American society during the 1960s.
In the following decade, the 1970s, scholars and intellectuals began looking into the often
neglected question of authority and how exactly obedience to authority related to the fundamental
problems of political philosophy.
In one year, 1975, two libertarian scholars, James J. Martin and Murray N. Rothbard, issued
competing editions of Etienne de la Boitie's 16th century essay, variously known as The
Politics of Obedience, The Discourse of Voluntary Servitude, and The Will to Bondage.
La Boitie, of course, had posed the question, since the ruled always outnumber their rulers,
Why do they acquiesce in their own oppression? Why do they not withdraw their support from
rulers who would be helpless without it? A year earlier, in 1974, a social psychologist
from the City University of New York, Stanley Milgram by name, had published a book on a
series of experiments he had conducted in New Haven, Connecticut, Cambridge, Massachusetts
and New York. Experiments that seemed to many to show that the average person was definitely
Milgram proposed two theories to account for his results. The first, which I call the psychological explanation, states that people can and do choose to think of themselves, at least at certain times, as instruments of someone else's will, and so no longer responsible for their own actions.
Milgram's second theory, which I call the sociological explanation, holds that under
certain circumstances most individuals abandon any attempt at independent thinking and simply
conform to what they feel is expected of them, what they have absorbed, mostly unthinkingly,
from the culture in which they have grown up and now live.
It was this sociological explanation that most appealed to Edgar Z. Friedenberg, a radical
education professor who checked in at the very end of the 1970s with a book I consider
mysteriously underrated by libertarians.
It's called Deference to Authority, the Case of Canada, and it was first published in 1980.
Edgar Z. Friedenberg was born in New York in 1921 but grew up in Shreveport, Louisiana,
where he later earned an undergraduate degree in chemistry at the tiny local Centenary College.
After completing a master's degree in chemistry at Stanford, Friedenberg served briefly in
the Navy during World War II, then returned to his studies.
He earned a Ph.D. in education at the University of Chicago in the late 1940s, then embarked
Friedenberg worked on a teaching career that took him from Hyde Park to Brooklyn College,
and from there to the University of California at Davis, then a sleepy agricultural community
about 10 or 15 miles outside Sacramento.
From there, Friedenberg went to Buffalo, New York, at the east end of Lake Erie, where
he taught at the State University of New York.
By now, it was the late 1960s.
Friedenberg was in his late 40s and the United States was embroiled in the Vietnam War.
Friedenberg was among those who regarded U.S. participation in that war as an abomination.
He had begun expressing his outrage in print in the mid-60s, though most of it was directed
at American public schools rather than at American foreign policy.
He had been writing for commentary in the early years of Norman Podhoretz's editorship
and for the New York Review of Books. He had been reviewing books for ramparts. He had
established himself as an important voice on what soon came to be called the New Left.
Then in 1970 he decided he would not for another day pay taxes to support the government in
Washington D.C. He moved to Canada and took a job teaching education at Dalhousie University
in Nova Scotia.
He became Emeritus Professor of Education at Dalhousie in 1986 when he was 65.
He continued in that position for the rest of the century, only retiring for good at
the end of the spring term in the year 2000 when he died, at the age of 79.
Though he lived in Canada for half his adult life, he had found within the first 10 years
It was of his residence there that the cultural differences between Canada and the United
States were larger than he had previously realized.
He saw that what people absorb, albeit mostly unthinkingly, from the culture in which they
have grown up and in which they now live, is extremely influential in shaping, if not
determining, the politics they will later advocate and countenance.
It was for this reason that in the late 1970s, from his new home in Nova Scotia, he wrote
Deference to Authority, the case of Canada.
He began by pointing out the differences not necessarily evident to the quickly glancing
eye between the political systems of the United States and Canada.
In the beginning, he wrote, it was necessary to understand that the parliamentary system
as such, provides no specific safeguards to liberty whatever, apart from the promise of
elections at specified intervals. This is a necessary but not a sufficient condition
of political liberty. Yet it is all Canadians really have. It was true, Friedenberg acknowledged,
that since 1960 there has been a Canadian Bill of Rights, but it is not a part of the
Constitution, it is merely statute law and can be repealed in whole or in part at any
session of Parliament. Moreover, the Bill of Rights has done nothing to limit the extraordinary
powers of search and seizure possessed by the Crown, which remain much as they were
at the time the American Founding Fathers sought to ensure, by means of the Fourth Amendment,
Authorities in the United States would never possess such powers.
Nor did a survey of the Canadian government's powers of search and seizure exhaust Friedenberg's
case.
The Crown, he wrote, can appeal against any acquittal if it can find a point of law to
hang the appeal on, and there always is one.
No judge is a perfect legal technician.
If it wins, the defendant will not be summarily convicted if he was acquitted by a jury rather
than a judge, but he is forced to submit to a new trial.
If he is again acquitted, the process can continue ad infinitum.
The crown has infinite resources.
The defendant is usually poor.
The pressure on the defendant to bargain for a lower sentence rather than defend himself
Then there was the Official Secrets Act.
Like Great Britain and unlike the United States, Friedenberg wrote, Canada has an Official
Secrets Act, making it an offense to transmit secret information to persons unauthorized
to receive it, or to receive such information without authorization.
The Official Secrets Act does not apply only or even especially to secrets allegedly related
to national security.
It applies to any information the government wishes to restrict.
Friedenberg found that Canadians themselves were well aware of these differences.
He noted, for example, that many Canadians have become disturbed about the infiltration
of Canadian Culture by American TV shows, and one of the complaints I have heard voiced
most frequently concerns the fact that these programs subvert peace, order and discipline
among the young by leading Canadian kids to believe they have constitutional rights.
The problem was, Friedenberg was told, that American television police programs, though
and, though usually fanatically supportive of law and order, still showed that bad guys, deplorable as this might be, had certain established rights,
the right to be informed by the arresting officer at the time of arrest of the charges under which the arrest is being made,
the right to make a phone call and obtain legal counsel before being interrogated,
and later, should the case come to trial, the right to decline to answer on the grounds
that the answers might be self-incriminating.
Friedenberg found that the Canadians who spoke with him on this subject were distressed because
young Canadians who watched American television were being misled into thinking they had such
rights.
They were not at all disturbed because the young people didn't have these rights.
They objected only to the fact that Canadian youth were being instilled with an alien and
misleading view of social reality.
It might be argued that these distinctions Friedenberg lists don't actually make that
much difference in the daily lives of ordinary individuals.
And up to a point, Friedenberg himself is willing to agree.
In practice, he wrote in the late 1970s, Canadians enjoy most of the same rights Americans do,
though in lesser degree.
But, and this is the clincher as far as Friedenberg is concerned, those rights are not guaranteed
in Canada.
Under the system of parliamentary supremacy they cannot be, for not only is parliament
are not permitted to intrude into any area it chooses. There exists at present no legal instrumentality by which it might be forbidden to do so.
And it is important to understand that, as Friedenberg put it, Canadians do not lack entrenched civil liberties because their form of government makes it difficult to provide them.
They accept a governmental structure under which liberty cannot be guaranteed, because they are highly ambivalent about personal freedom,
and because they genuinely believe that government is designed to be an instrument for advancing the general welfare, and is not in principle anything to fear.
For what is clearly absent from Canadian political consciousness, though salient in the American, is the conviction that the state and its apparatus are the natural enemies of freedom.
The plain fact is, Friedenberg wrote, that unlike Americans, and for that matter unlike the British, who have had their share of rebellions and revolutions, some of them glorious,
Canadians as such have no tradition identifying government as the source of oppression.
They resisted the temptation to join the American Revolution, and their loyalty to the Crown
was reinforced by the flight of loyalists northward from the revolting colonies.
Canadian society, Friedenberg wrote, is ideologically committed to peace, order and good government
as higher values than life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.
But peace, order and good government in Canada depend ultimately on the deep acquiescence
of the people in the idea that they have no inalienable rights, and that the public has
no right to ask questions that probe into matters it has been told are not its concern.
Canadian society, Friedenberg complained, assumes that respect for the law is a good
thing and that there cannot be too much of it.
But Canadians already have too much of it, and to lose some would probably do the country
good.
Canadian society is deficient not in respect for law, but in respect for liberty.
And just how much respect for liberty did Friedenberg believe Canadian society ought
The administration of authority, he wrote, can be useful.
In limited emergencies it may be crucial to survival, but authority is a powerful depressant
and extremely addictive.
Like other tranquilizers, authority is prescribed to solve problems that have been mistakenly
diagnosed and whose real roots it cannot touch and serves, in fact, to obscure.
People, Friedenberg believed, whether they were citizens of the United States or citizens
of Canada, should be brutally realistic with themselves about the true nature and potential
of the force wielded by government.
As he put it in one place in Deference to Authority, there is or should be nothing shocking
about discovering that police have abused civil liberties and that their responsible
superiors have helped them conceal their misdeeds.
It is no more shocking than the discovery that the family dog has messed on the rug.
It can't be permitted to continue, and you may have to smack the animal with a newspaper
to teach it to quit, or get rid of it if it simply can't be trained.
But the disclosure of the mess and how it happened does not bring discredit on the household.
Indeed, this is the only way to get it cleaned up, sweeping it under the rug and accepting
Seeing it as evidence that the dog is zealous in defending the security of the home will
however soon make the house uninhabitable.
The householders may also help to forestall such domestic tragedies if they learn to detect
by its usually stiff and pompous gait when the creature is really full of shit and turn
it out before it gets a chance to do further damage.
Edgar Z. Friedenberg is probably best understood by people of our sort as a libertarian outsider,
one of those independent intellectuals who, usually through a career-long obsession with
one particular social or political issue, eventually reason themselves into a version
of libertarianism.
Once they do it, it's not always clear whether they realize just what it is they've done.
Certainly many of the outsiders never describe themselves publicly as libertarian or otherwise
give evidence that they grasp what their thinking has led them to.
Friedenberg never really did.
He did say in a letter dated December 12, 1967, replying to a request from the Wilson
Library Bulletin, that I hope I might have something to say to libertarians, but at the
moment I don't have time to say it.
But it's likely that in late 1967 Friedenberg did have a fairly clear understanding of what
a libertarian was. He had been in Port Huron, Michigan at the founding convention of Students
for a Democratic Society in 1962. He knew Carl Oglesby, the Rothbardian libertarian
who presided over SDS during school year 1965-66. But exactly what he believed he had to say
to Libertarians remains unclear, unless it's the pretty consistently libertarian observations
I've quoted from Deference to Authority, published 13 years later.
As of this writing in late August 2010, Deference to Authority is out of print.
All of Friedenberg's books, with the exception of one he edited in 1971, are out of print.
He doesn't even have a Wikipedia article.
Effectively, he's forgotten. Yet, like Stanley Milgram, he added a little something to Étienne de la Boite's observations of nearly half a millennium ago on the politics of obedience, the will to bondage, and, in the process, he ensured a small place for himself in the libertarian tradition.
He ought to be remembered, especially by libertarians.
This is Jeff Rigginveig.