WEBVTT NOTE Edgar Z. Friedenberg: Deference to Authority 1 00:00:00.000 --> 00:00:12.000 The Ludwig von Mises Institute presents The Libertarian Tradition, an audio series with Jeff Rigenbach. 2 00:00:12.000 --> 00:00:22.000 As we all know, massive rebellions against duly constituted authority, we refer to them today as the Civil Rights Movement, 3 00:00:22.000 --> 00:00:28.400 movement, the anti-draft and anti-Vietnam war movements, and the counterculture swept 4 00:00:28.400 --> 00:00:32.380 through American society during the 1960s. 5 00:00:32.380 --> 00:00:39.020 In the following decade, the 1970s, scholars and intellectuals began looking into the often 6 00:00:39.020 --> 00:00:46.160 neglected question of authority and how exactly obedience to authority related to the fundamental 7 00:00:46.160 --> 00:00:48.980 problems of political philosophy. 8 00:00:48.980 --> 00:00:57.000 In one year, 1975, two libertarian scholars, James J. Martin and Murray N. Rothbard, issued 9 00:00:57.000 --> 00:01:03.980 competing editions of Etienne de la Boitie's 16th century essay, variously known as The 10 00:01:03.980 --> 00:01:10.160 Politics of Obedience, The Discourse of Voluntary Servitude, and The Will to Bondage. 11 00:01:10.160 --> 00:01:17.580 La Boitie, of course, had posed the question, since the ruled always outnumber their rulers, 12 00:01:17.580 --> 00:01:22.740 Why do they acquiesce in their own oppression? Why do they not withdraw their support from 13 00:01:22.740 --> 00:01:29.500 rulers who would be helpless without it? A year earlier, in 1974, a social psychologist 14 00:01:29.500 --> 00:01:35.060 from the City University of New York, Stanley Milgram by name, had published a book on a 15 00:01:35.060 --> 00:01:40.700 series of experiments he had conducted in New Haven, Connecticut, Cambridge, Massachusetts 16 00:01:40.700 --> 00:01:47.480 and New York. Experiments that seemed to many to show that the average person was definitely 17 00:01:47.480 --> 00:01:54.480 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. 18 00:02:17.480 --> 00:02:23.560 Milgram's second theory, which I call the sociological explanation, holds that under 19 00:02:23.560 --> 00:02:30.260 certain circumstances most individuals abandon any attempt at independent thinking and simply 20 00:02:30.260 --> 00:02:36.840 conform to what they feel is expected of them, what they have absorbed, mostly unthinkingly, 21 00:02:36.840 --> 00:02:41.320 from the culture in which they have grown up and now live. 22 00:02:41.320 --> 00:02:47.640 It was this sociological explanation that most appealed to Edgar Z. Friedenberg, a radical 23 00:02:47.640 --> 00:02:53.800 education professor who checked in at the very end of the 1970s with a book I consider 24 00:02:53.800 --> 00:02:57.280 mysteriously underrated by libertarians. 25 00:02:57.280 --> 00:03:04.840 It's called Deference to Authority, the Case of Canada, and it was first published in 1980. 26 00:03:04.840 --> 00:03:11.820 Edgar Z. Friedenberg was born in New York in 1921 but grew up in Shreveport, Louisiana, 27 00:03:11.820 --> 00:03:18.420 where he later earned an undergraduate degree in chemistry at the tiny local Centenary College. 28 00:03:18.420 --> 00:03:23.540 After completing a master's degree in chemistry at Stanford, Friedenberg served briefly in 29 00:03:23.540 --> 00:03:28.020 the Navy during World War II, then returned to his studies. 30 00:03:28.020 --> 00:03:34.300 He earned a Ph.D. in education at the University of Chicago in the late 1940s, then embarked 31 00:03:34.300 --> 00:03:38.980 Friedenberg worked on a teaching career that took him from Hyde Park to Brooklyn College, 32 00:03:38.980 --> 00:03:45.300 and from there to the University of California at Davis, then a sleepy agricultural community 33 00:03:45.300 --> 00:03:49.300 about 10 or 15 miles outside Sacramento. 34 00:03:49.300 --> 00:03:54.020 From there, Friedenberg went to Buffalo, New York, at the east end of Lake Erie, where 35 00:03:54.020 --> 00:03:57.220 he taught at the State University of New York. 36 00:03:57.220 --> 00:04:00.140 By now, it was the late 1960s. 37 00:04:00.140 --> 00:04:06.360 Friedenberg was in his late 40s and the United States was embroiled in the Vietnam War. 38 00:04:06.360 --> 00:04:12.480 Friedenberg was among those who regarded U.S. participation in that war as an abomination. 39 00:04:12.480 --> 00:04:18.080 He had begun expressing his outrage in print in the mid-60s, though most of it was directed 40 00:04:18.080 --> 00:04:23.000 at American public schools rather than at American foreign policy. 41 00:04:23.000 --> 00:04:28.420 He had been writing for commentary in the early years of Norman Podhoretz's editorship 42 00:04:28.420 --> 00:04:34.080 and for the New York Review of Books. He had been reviewing books for ramparts. He had 43 00:04:34.080 --> 00:04:40.520 established himself as an important voice on what soon came to be called the New Left. 44 00:04:40.520 --> 00:04:46.680 Then in 1970 he decided he would not for another day pay taxes to support the government in 45 00:04:46.680 --> 00:04:53.500 Washington D.C. He moved to Canada and took a job teaching education at Dalhousie University 46 00:04:53.500 --> 00:04:55.800 in Nova Scotia. 47 00:04:55.800 --> 00:05:02.580 He became Emeritus Professor of Education at Dalhousie in 1986 when he was 65. 48 00:05:02.580 --> 00:05:08.140 He continued in that position for the rest of the century, only retiring for good at 49 00:05:08.140 --> 00:05:14.500 the end of the spring term in the year 2000 when he died, at the age of 79. 50 00:05:14.500 --> 00:05:19.540 Though he lived in Canada for half his adult life, he had found within the first 10 years 51 00:05:19.540 --> 00:05:24.100 It was of his residence there that the cultural differences between Canada and the United 52 00:05:24.100 --> 00:05:28.080 States were larger than he had previously realized. 53 00:05:28.080 --> 00:05:33.880 He saw that what people absorb, albeit mostly unthinkingly, from the culture in which they 54 00:05:33.880 --> 00:05:40.260 have grown up and in which they now live, is extremely influential in shaping, if not 55 00:05:40.260 --> 00:05:45.080 determining, the politics they will later advocate and countenance. 56 00:05:45.080 --> 00:05:51.040 It was for this reason that in the late 1970s, from his new home in Nova Scotia, he wrote 57 00:05:51.040 --> 00:05:55.120 Deference to Authority, the case of Canada. 58 00:05:55.120 --> 00:06:00.560 He began by pointing out the differences not necessarily evident to the quickly glancing 59 00:06:00.560 --> 00:06:05.880 eye between the political systems of the United States and Canada. 60 00:06:05.880 --> 00:06:11.080 In the beginning, he wrote, it was necessary to understand that the parliamentary system 61 00:06:11.080 --> 00:06:17.600 as such, provides no specific safeguards to liberty whatever, apart from the promise of 62 00:06:17.600 --> 00:06:24.120 elections at specified intervals. This is a necessary but not a sufficient condition 63 00:06:24.120 --> 00:06:32.080 of political liberty. Yet it is all Canadians really have. It was true, Friedenberg acknowledged, 64 00:06:32.080 --> 00:06:38.280 that since 1960 there has been a Canadian Bill of Rights, but it is not a part of the 65 00:06:38.280 --> 00:06:44.720 Constitution, it is merely statute law and can be repealed in whole or in part at any 66 00:06:44.720 --> 00:06:51.240 session of Parliament. Moreover, the Bill of Rights has done nothing to limit the extraordinary 67 00:06:51.240 --> 00:06:56.480 powers of search and seizure possessed by the Crown, which remain much as they were 68 00:06:56.480 --> 00:07:02.640 at the time the American Founding Fathers sought to ensure, by means of the Fourth Amendment, 69 00:07:02.640 --> 00:07:08.200 Authorities in the United States would never possess such powers. 70 00:07:08.200 --> 00:07:14.040 Nor did a survey of the Canadian government's powers of search and seizure exhaust Friedenberg's 71 00:07:14.040 --> 00:07:15.040 case. 72 00:07:15.040 --> 00:07:20.680 The Crown, he wrote, can appeal against any acquittal if it can find a point of law to 73 00:07:20.680 --> 00:07:24.500 hang the appeal on, and there always is one. 74 00:07:24.500 --> 00:07:27.760 No judge is a perfect legal technician. 75 00:07:27.760 --> 00:07:33.580 If it wins, the defendant will not be summarily convicted if he was acquitted by a jury rather 76 00:07:33.580 --> 00:07:38.500 than a judge, but he is forced to submit to a new trial. 77 00:07:38.500 --> 00:07:44.300 If he is again acquitted, the process can continue ad infinitum. 78 00:07:44.300 --> 00:07:46.880 The crown has infinite resources. 79 00:07:46.880 --> 00:07:49.620 The defendant is usually poor. 80 00:07:49.620 --> 00:07:54.540 The pressure on the defendant to bargain for a lower sentence rather than defend himself 81 00:07:54.540 --> 00:08:02.620 Then there was the Official Secrets Act. 82 00:08:02.620 --> 00:08:08.420 Like Great Britain and unlike the United States, Friedenberg wrote, Canada has an Official 83 00:08:08.420 --> 00:08:14.940 Secrets Act, making it an offense to transmit secret information to persons unauthorized 84 00:08:14.940 --> 00:08:20.340 to receive it, or to receive such information without authorization. 85 00:08:20.340 --> 00:08:26.660 The Official Secrets Act does not apply only or even especially to secrets allegedly related 86 00:08:26.660 --> 00:08:28.500 to national security. 87 00:08:28.500 --> 00:08:33.940 It applies to any information the government wishes to restrict. 88 00:08:33.940 --> 00:08:38.900 Friedenberg found that Canadians themselves were well aware of these differences. 89 00:08:38.900 --> 00:08:44.360 He noted, for example, that many Canadians have become disturbed about the infiltration 90 00:08:44.360 --> 00:08:50.660 of Canadian Culture by American TV shows, and one of the complaints I have heard voiced 91 00:08:50.660 --> 00:08:57.220 most frequently concerns the fact that these programs subvert peace, order and discipline 92 00:08:57.220 --> 00:09:03.620 among the young by leading Canadian kids to believe they have constitutional rights. 93 00:09:03.620 --> 00:09:09.400 The problem was, Friedenberg was told, that American television police programs, though 94 00:09:09.400 --> 00:09:20.400 and, though usually fanatically supportive of law and order, still showed that bad guys, deplorable as this might be, had certain established rights, 95 00:09:20.400 --> 00:09:28.400 the right to be informed by the arresting officer at the time of arrest of the charges under which the arrest is being made, 96 00:09:28.400 --> 00:09:34.400 the right to make a phone call and obtain legal counsel before being interrogated, 97 00:09:34.400 --> 00:09:39.840 and later, should the case come to trial, the right to decline to answer on the grounds 98 00:09:39.840 --> 00:09:43.280 that the answers might be self-incriminating. 99 00:09:43.280 --> 00:09:48.720 Friedenberg found that the Canadians who spoke with him on this subject were distressed because 100 00:09:48.720 --> 00:09:55.600 young Canadians who watched American television were being misled into thinking they had such 101 00:09:55.600 --> 00:09:56.600 rights. 102 00:09:56.600 --> 00:10:01.460 They were not at all disturbed because the young people didn't have these rights. 103 00:10:01.460 --> 00:10:07.300 They objected only to the fact that Canadian youth were being instilled with an alien and 104 00:10:07.300 --> 00:10:11.380 misleading view of social reality. 105 00:10:11.380 --> 00:10:16.640 It might be argued that these distinctions Friedenberg lists don't actually make that 106 00:10:16.640 --> 00:10:21.140 much difference in the daily lives of ordinary individuals. 107 00:10:21.140 --> 00:10:25.420 And up to a point, Friedenberg himself is willing to agree. 108 00:10:25.420 --> 00:10:32.340 In practice, he wrote in the late 1970s, Canadians enjoy most of the same rights Americans do, 109 00:10:32.340 --> 00:10:34.300 though in lesser degree. 110 00:10:34.300 --> 00:10:41.460 But, and this is the clincher as far as Friedenberg is concerned, those rights are not guaranteed 111 00:10:41.460 --> 00:10:43.020 in Canada. 112 00:10:43.020 --> 00:10:48.860 Under the system of parliamentary supremacy they cannot be, for not only is parliament 113 00:10:48.860 --> 00:10:58.860 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. 114 00:10:58.860 --> 00:11:10.860 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. 115 00:11:10.860 --> 00:11:20.860 They accept a governmental structure under which liberty cannot be guaranteed, because they are highly ambivalent about personal freedom, 116 00:11:20.860 --> 00:11:31.860 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. 117 00:11:31.860 --> 00:11:45.860 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. 118 00:11:45.860 --> 00:11:57.860 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, 119 00:11:57.860 --> 00:12:04.740 Canadians as such have no tradition identifying government as the source of oppression. 120 00:12:04.740 --> 00:12:10.180 They resisted the temptation to join the American Revolution, and their loyalty to the Crown 121 00:12:10.180 --> 00:12:16.220 was reinforced by the flight of loyalists northward from the revolting colonies. 122 00:12:16.220 --> 00:12:23.660 Canadian society, Friedenberg wrote, is ideologically committed to peace, order and good government 123 00:12:23.660 --> 00:12:29.420 as higher values than life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. 124 00:12:29.420 --> 00:12:35.440 But peace, order and good government in Canada depend ultimately on the deep acquiescence 125 00:12:35.440 --> 00:12:41.320 of the people in the idea that they have no inalienable rights, and that the public has 126 00:12:41.320 --> 00:12:48.140 no right to ask questions that probe into matters it has been told are not its concern. 127 00:12:48.140 --> 00:12:54.140 Canadian society, Friedenberg complained, assumes that respect for the law is a good 128 00:12:54.140 --> 00:12:57.940 thing and that there cannot be too much of it. 129 00:12:57.940 --> 00:13:03.780 But Canadians already have too much of it, and to lose some would probably do the country 130 00:13:03.780 --> 00:13:05.260 good. 131 00:13:05.260 --> 00:13:11.660 Canadian society is deficient not in respect for law, but in respect for liberty. 132 00:13:11.660 --> 00:13:16.860 And just how much respect for liberty did Friedenberg believe Canadian society ought 133 00:13:16.860 --> 00:13:22.720 The administration of authority, he wrote, can be useful. 134 00:13:22.720 --> 00:13:28.920 In limited emergencies it may be crucial to survival, but authority is a powerful depressant 135 00:13:28.920 --> 00:13:31.460 and extremely addictive. 136 00:13:31.460 --> 00:13:37.060 Like other tranquilizers, authority is prescribed to solve problems that have been mistakenly 137 00:13:37.060 --> 00:13:44.340 diagnosed and whose real roots it cannot touch and serves, in fact, to obscure. 138 00:13:44.340 --> 00:13:49.700 People, Friedenberg believed, whether they were citizens of the United States or citizens 139 00:13:49.700 --> 00:13:56.220 of Canada, should be brutally realistic with themselves about the true nature and potential 140 00:13:56.220 --> 00:13:59.340 of the force wielded by government. 141 00:13:59.340 --> 00:14:05.300 As he put it in one place in Deference to Authority, there is or should be nothing shocking 142 00:14:05.300 --> 00:14:10.340 about discovering that police have abused civil liberties and that their responsible 143 00:14:10.340 --> 00:14:13.980 superiors have helped them conceal their misdeeds. 144 00:14:13.980 --> 00:14:19.280 It is no more shocking than the discovery that the family dog has messed on the rug. 145 00:14:19.280 --> 00:14:24.260 It can't be permitted to continue, and you may have to smack the animal with a newspaper 146 00:14:24.260 --> 00:14:29.100 to teach it to quit, or get rid of it if it simply can't be trained. 147 00:14:29.100 --> 00:14:35.340 But the disclosure of the mess and how it happened does not bring discredit on the household. 148 00:14:35.340 --> 00:14:41.260 Indeed, this is the only way to get it cleaned up, sweeping it under the rug and accepting 149 00:14:41.260 --> 00:14:46.520 Seeing it as evidence that the dog is zealous in defending the security of the home will 150 00:14:46.520 --> 00:14:49.780 however soon make the house uninhabitable. 151 00:14:49.780 --> 00:14:55.740 The householders may also help to forestall such domestic tragedies if they learn to detect 152 00:14:55.740 --> 00:15:02.140 by its usually stiff and pompous gait when the creature is really full of shit and turn 153 00:15:02.140 --> 00:15:06.220 it out before it gets a chance to do further damage. 154 00:15:06.220 --> 00:15:13.420 Edgar Z. Friedenberg is probably best understood by people of our sort as a libertarian outsider, 155 00:15:13.420 --> 00:15:19.060 one of those independent intellectuals who, usually through a career-long obsession with 156 00:15:19.060 --> 00:15:25.740 one particular social or political issue, eventually reason themselves into a version 157 00:15:25.740 --> 00:15:27.620 of libertarianism. 158 00:15:27.620 --> 00:15:33.180 Once they do it, it's not always clear whether they realize just what it is they've done. 159 00:15:33.180 --> 00:15:39.300 Certainly many of the outsiders never describe themselves publicly as libertarian or otherwise 160 00:15:39.300 --> 00:15:43.620 give evidence that they grasp what their thinking has led them to. 161 00:15:43.620 --> 00:15:45.740 Friedenberg never really did. 162 00:15:45.740 --> 00:15:52.460 He did say in a letter dated December 12, 1967, replying to a request from the Wilson 163 00:15:52.460 --> 00:15:58.540 Library Bulletin, that I hope I might have something to say to libertarians, but at the 164 00:15:58.540 --> 00:16:01.240 moment I don't have time to say it. 165 00:16:01.240 --> 00:16:07.400 But it's likely that in late 1967 Friedenberg did have a fairly clear understanding of what 166 00:16:07.400 --> 00:16:13.240 a libertarian was. He had been in Port Huron, Michigan at the founding convention of Students 167 00:16:13.240 --> 00:16:20.480 for a Democratic Society in 1962. He knew Carl Oglesby, the Rothbardian libertarian 168 00:16:20.480 --> 00:16:29.100 who presided over SDS during school year 1965-66. But exactly what he believed he had to say 169 00:16:29.100 --> 00:16:35.620 to Libertarians remains unclear, unless it's the pretty consistently libertarian observations 170 00:16:35.620 --> 00:16:41.540 I've quoted from Deference to Authority, published 13 years later. 171 00:16:41.540 --> 00:16:47.620 As of this writing in late August 2010, Deference to Authority is out of print. 172 00:16:47.620 --> 00:16:54.660 All of Friedenberg's books, with the exception of one he edited in 1971, are out of print. 173 00:16:54.660 --> 00:16:57.380 He doesn't even have a Wikipedia article. 174 00:16:57.380 --> 00:17:18.380 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. 175 00:17:18.380 --> 00:17:23.380 He ought to be remembered, especially by libertarians. 176 00:17:23.380 --> 00:17:25.380 This is Jeff Rigginveig.