Key ideas: Published in 1952. Back to: One Is a Crowd: Reflections of an Individualist - by Frank Chodorov
Lenin said it long ago: to make collectivism stick in a land that has known the blessings of individualism, you must catch a whole generation in the cradle and forcibly deprive it of tutors who have learned the bourgeois alphabet at their mothers’ knees….
A recent preoccupation with my own intellectual autobiography has led me to reflect on the culture-carriers who brought me back to what I had originally soaked up unconsciously in the individualistic New England of my childhood. One of these carriers was Albert Jay Nock, whose “Our Enemy the State” hit me between the eyes when I read it in the thirties.
Another potent carrier was Franz Oppenheimer, whose concept of the State-as-racket (see his epochal book on “The State”) was too formidably grounded in history to permit of any easy denial.
Still another carrier was Garet Garrett, the only economist I know who can make a single image or metaphor do the work of a whole page of statistics. [See Garrett’s The People’s Pottage]
Then there was Henry George, the Single Taxer, and the Thoreau whose doctrine of civil disobedience implied a fealty to a higher—or a Natural—law, and Isabel Paterson, the doughty and perennially embattled woman who wrote “The God of the Machine.”
Finally, there was a man who sometimes spoke in parables and who always had a special brand of quiet humor, Mr. Frank Chodorov, whose lifetime of broadsheet writing and pamphleteering has been brilliantly raided by Devin A. Garrity of the Devin-Adair Co. to make this book….
Listening to Mr. Chodorov, you won t get any meaningless gabble about “right” and “left,” or “progressive” and “reactionary,” or liberalism as a philosophy of the “middle of the road.” Mr. Chodorov deals in far more fundamental distinctions. There is, for example, the Chodorovian distinction between social power and political power.
Social power develops from the creation of wealth by individuals working alone or in voluntary concert. Political power, on the other hand, grows by the forcible appropriation of the individual’s social power.
Mr. Chodorov sees history as an eternal struggle between social-power and political-power philosophies. When social power is in the ascendant, men are inclined to be inventive, creative, resourceful, curious, tolerant, loving and good-humored. The standard of well-being rises in such times—vide the histories of republican Rome, of the Hanseatic cities, of the Italian renaissance, of nineteenth century Britain and of modern America. But when political power is waxing, men begin to burn books, to suppress thought, and
But when political power is waxing, men begin to burn books, to suppress thought, and to imprison and kill their dissident brothers. Taxation, which is the important barometer of the political power, robs the individual of the fruits of his energy, and the standard of life declines as men secretly rebel against extending themselves in labor that brings them diminishing returns.
According to the Chodorov rationale, all the great political movements of modern times are slave philosophies. For, no matter whether they speak in the name of communism, socialism, fascism, New Dealism or the Welfare (sometimes called the Positive) State, the modern political philosophers are all alike in advocating the forcible seizure of bigger and bigger proportions of the individual’s energy.
It matters not a whit whether the coercion is done by club or the tax agent —the coercion of labor is there; and such coercion is a definition of slavery. Nor does it matter that the energy-product of one individual is spent by the government on another: such spending makes beneficiaries into wards, and wards are slaves, too.
Mr. Chodorov is a mystic, but only in the sense that all men of insight are mystics. His mystical assumption is that men are born as individuals possessing inalienable rights. This philosophy of Natural Rights under the Natural Law of the Universe can not be “proved” But neither can the opposite philosophy—that Society has rights—be proved, either. You can say it is demonstrable that a State, as the police agent of Society, has power.
But if there is no such thing as natural individual rights, with a correlative superstructure of justice organized to maintain those rights, then the individual has no valid subjective reason for obeying State power. True, the State can arrest the individual and compel his temporary obedience. But it can not compel his inner loyalty; nor can it keep men from cheating, or from the quiet withdrawal of energy.
The rebellious individual can always find ways of flouting State power—which makes it dubious that Society (or the collectivity of men organized to compel individual men; has rights in any meaningful sense of the word. A collectivity can not have anything which its constitutive elements refuse to give up.
Since the human animal must make either one mystical assumption or another about rights, Mr. Chodorov chooses the assumption that accords with the desire of his nature, which is to protect itself against the lawlessness of arbitrary power. He is mystical in the same way that James Madison and Thomas Jefferson and the rest of the Founding Fathers were mystical; and he is religious enough to believe in Nature’s God, which is to say that he believes in Natural Law…
…But it is also good instruction; like all good teachers, Chodorov knows that instruction is always improved when it comes in the form of entertainment. What he offers in his essays as entertainment is, of course, worth ten of the ordinary political science courses that one gets in our modern schools. It is a measure of our educational delinquency that nobody has ever seen fit to endow Mr. Chodorov with a university chair. But his successors will have chairs once Mr. Chodorov has completed his mission in life, which is to swing the newest generations into line against the idiocies of a collectivist epoch that is now coming to an end in foolish disaster and blood.
Back to: One Is a Crowd: Reflections of an Individualist - by Frank Chodorov