“Fusionism,” many pundits say, defines
modern American conservatism. The
“fusionist” model sees cultural traditionalists devoted to family, community,
and heritage fused ideologically to free-marketeers and free traders, forming a
vibrant intellectual and political coalition.
To understand this “fusionist” paradigm, its creators would have us envision
traditionalist man-of-letters Russell Kirk rowing along with libertarian economist
Ludwig von Mises in a two-man scull, exhibiting one purpose and showing
mutually grateful and admiring smiles.
Beneath
“fusionism” lies the deeper assumption that both cultural traditionalism
and market
economies
are in some way natural. Traditional culture, this theory has it, rests on the innate
human bonds of family, kin, and neighboring, and reflects the hard lessons of human
experience. For its part, the market
economy expresses a “spontaneous order” also derived from human nature; enter
here Adam Smith’s “bartering savage,” that primitive a fellow always seeking a
good trade.
And
so, the “fusionist” Conservative Canon includes von Mises’ book, Human
Action, alongside Kirk’s The Conservative Mind. It includes economist Friedrich Hayek’s
Road
to Serfdom alongside Robert Nisbet’s The Quest for Community,
our subject today.
NISBET’S
“ECONOMICS”
However,
in reading Nisbet, we soon realize that something here is not-quite-right. While
The Quest for Community is not
primarily about economics, it does have important things to say about economic
relationships and especially about economic history. And what it says has little resonance with the free market ideas
of Hayek and von Mises.
To
begin with, free-marketeers argue that all human societies face the same
problem: the optimal allocation of scarce resources. This leads to the concept of marginal utility, and to the virtue
of trade. They also explain that free
markets—as the very phrase implies—are the product of liberty, and that markets
arise despite the best efforts of states to suppress freedom and to
control economic exchange.
Yet,
on page 95 of Quest, Robert Nisbet is:
….led to wonder how far capitalism was the work of
businessmen at all, and how far it was the consequence of the overthrow of the
medieval system by the military might of the absolute state.[1]
On page 247, Nisbet adds:
Laissez faire…was brought into existence. It was brought into existence by the
planned destruction of old customs, associations, villages, and other
securities, by the force of the State throwing the weight of its
fast-developing administrative system in favor of the new economic elements of
the population.[2]
And in endnote 4, found on page 257, the author
summarizes:
There is indeed much to be said for regarding
capitalism as simply the forced adjustment of economic life to the needs of the
sovereign State.[3]
Historians
friendly to the free market also point to the 19th Century as the
great age of small government, when liberal reforms cut back state power and
allowed free commerce to blossom.
Nisbet, though, sees the matter differently. As he writes on page 149:
In actual fact the State achieved [in the nineteenth
century] a position of power and direction in human affairs that was
unprecedented in European history. Even
in England, the full advent of industrialism was accompanied by an increase
in political law and administration greater, during the decades of the [eighteen]
thirties and forties alone, than anything known earlier.[4]
Economic
historians of a free-market bent also celebrate spontaneous markets as the
source of social and economic order. Nisbet
strongly dissents. On page 212, he
writes:
There is indeed a sense in which the so-called free
market never existed at all save in the imaginations of the
rationalists….Most of the relative stability of nineteenth-century capitalism
arose from the fact of the very incompleteness of the capitalist
revolution. Because large areas of
Europe and the United States remained predominately rural and strongly
suffused by precapitalist relationships and desires, a large measure of
national stability coexisted with the rise of the new industrial cities and the
new practices of manufacture and commerce.[5]
On
the following page, following a direct rebuke of Hayek, Nisbet adds:
Not all the asserted advantages of mass production
and corporate bigness will save capitalism if its purposes become impersonal
and remote, separated from the symbols and relationships that have meaning in
human lives.[6]
Finally, free marketeers normally
find labor unions to be gross distortions of economic efficiency, loathsome
drags on growth and freedom. Nisbet, in
contrast, asks:
…is it not obvious that the rise of the modern labor
union and the cooperative have been powerful forces in support of
capitalism and economic freedom? …Not
to the imaginary motives of the individualist but to the associational
realities of the labor union and the cooperative…must we look for the real
defenses against political invasions of economic freedom.[7]
Well,
it seems safe to conclude that young Robert Nisbet, author of The
Quest for Community, was far from free market libertarianism. Indeed, his view of economics seems almost radical. In his analysis of the coercive nature and
revolutionary qualities of capitalism, some might even detect the faintest
whiff of Marxist analysis. From where
did Nisbet derive his peculiar take on economics? And how does it affect the book’s key conclusion, namely Nisbet’s
call for a new kind of laissez faire?
POLANYI AND
THE GREAT TRANSFORMATION
Answering
the first question, Nisbet drew his analysis of the rise of capitalism from a
variety of sources, including Max Weber, Miriam Beard, and Eli Heckscher. Yet the most common reference on these matters
in Quest
for Community is to the 1944 book The Great Transformation, authored
by the renegade economic historian Karl Polanyi. Who was he?
Polanyi
was a member of that band of economic geniuses born in the late 19th
Century and raised in Vienna, only to be cut adrift by the collapse of the
Austro-Hungarian Empire and the rise of fascism. This remarkable band did also include Hayek and von Mises,
along with the great 20th Century management guru Peter
Drucker.
Karl Polanyi was, in
addition, a member of an extraordinary family.
To a person, he and his four siblings worked to defeat the nineteenth
century liberal, free market ideal, to find a new society that would be free
but not liberal, prosperous but not dominated by economics, communitarian but
not Marxist. As Peter Drucker reports
in his splendid essay on the Polanyis, “the market creed of the Manchester
Liberals may be called the hereditary enemy of the House of Polanyi.”[8]
Karl’s father was born into
a Hungarian Jewish home, but he converted to Calvinism. After making a fortune in Central European railroads,
he married a young Russian countess, Cecilia, who was wanted back in Moscow for
anarchist agitation and terrorist acts.
As a teenager, she had even planted bombs.
This curious
couple had five children, all educated at home (pointing, as you will
see, to both the promise and the perils of home schooling). The eldest son, Otto, made a fortune as a
supplier of parts to the new Fiat automobile company. He went on to co-found the Italian socialist journal
Avanti
and to become mentor to its gifted young editor, Benito Mussolini. Brother Adolph Polanyi left Europe for
Brazil. He formed there a group of intellectuals,
artists, and politicians devoted to the mystique of “the New Brazil,” the would-be
“society of the future.” He preached
“Brazil’s continental mission.” Karl’s
sister, nicknamed Mousie, inspired and guided the Hungarian folk movement that
spawned the music of Bartok, the discipline of “rural sociology,” and the peasant
political parties of the first “Green International.” The young Croatian later known to the world as Marshall Tito was
a “rural sociologist” and a follower of Mousie Polanyi. The first Israeli kibbutz was modeled on one
of her agrarian tracts. Karl’s younger
brother, Michael, became Albert Einstein’s assistant at age 30, and later a
humanist philosopher most at home with the ancient Roman Stoics.
Karl
actually began his career as a free-market liberal and journalist. Following wartime service as an officer in
the Austro-Hungarian Army, Karl Polanyi became managing editor of the magazine,
The
Austrian Economist. When the journal
folded during the 1930’s, and with Naziism on the rise, Polanyi moved his
family to London. As all of Europe
seemed to succumb to either Communism or Fascism, he pondered the reasons for
the failure of liberal societies. He
allied himself to radical Christian groups, such as the Quakers and the
Catholic Distributists, who looked to the renewal of agrarian communal
life. Intellectually, he spent these
years engaged in a critical personal dialogue with both Karl Marx and the
modern market liberalism of von Mises.
And he befriended his fellow exile from Vienna, Peter Drucker, author of
the seminal 1939 book, The End of Economic Man.
Indeed,
it was Drucker who secured for Polanyi a visiting professorship at Bennington
College, in Vermont. Drucker tells of
the war winter of 1942-43, when:
Two or three times a week…Kathleen—our daughter—and
I trudged through deep snow to the tiny cottage where the Polanyis lived and
listened to what was to become The Great Transformation.[9]
This
book is best seen as a revisionist history of the industrial revolution and as
an explanation for the collapse of nineteenth century civilization. Polanyi boldly declares his theme on the
book’s first page:
Our thesis is that the idea of a self-adjusting
market implied a stark utopia.
Such an institution could not exist for any length of time
without annihilating the human and natural substance of society;
it would have physically destroyed man and transformed his surroundings into a
wilderness.[10]
The author argued that “previously to our time
[i.e., 1800] no economy has ever existed that, even in principle, was
controlled by markets….[G]ain or profit made on exchange never before played an
important part in human economy.”
Rather, Polanyi insisted that the natural human economy rested on
three other principles: reciprocity; redistribution; and householding,
by which he meant “[family] production for use.” Polanyi agreed with Aristotle in viewing production for gain “as
not natural for man.” In the natural
human economy, markets and money were “mere accessories” to otherwise
self-sufficient households.
Creation
of the nineteenth century liberal order, Polanyi said, was an act of faith and
coercion, not of nature. It depended on
proactive government. “Laissez faire
itself was enforced by the state,” he wrote.
“Laissez faire was not a method to achieve a thing, it was the
thing to be achieved.” It meant making human
society subservient to the economic mechanism.[11] As
one contemporary analyst, Fred Block, summarizes: “[Polanyi] is arguing that market
society—not just at its moment of formation, but continuously—depends on
extra-economic [political] coercion.”[12]
The
radical break in human economic history, according to Polanyi, came in the
early 19th Century when legal changes—such as England’s Poor Law of
1834 and repeal of the Corn Laws in 1842—transformed labor and land into
commodities. This was the great
error, he said. Labor, Polanyi insisted,
was “only another name for human activity which…[cannot] be detached from the
rest of life.” And “land is only
another name for nature.” It was
“entirely fictitious,” he maintained, to treat them as commodities, and
dangerous as well. “Robbed of the
protective covering of cultural institutions, human beings would perish from
the effects of social exposure….Nature would be reduced to its elements,
neighborhoods and landscapes defiled, rivers polluted.”[13] The stupendous material gains of the
self-regulating market—which Polanyi readily acknowledged—would be bought at
the price of the substance of society, through the annihilation of all organic human
bonds and ecological desecration.
However,
Polanyi also insisted that human beings would refuse to live this way, creating
a historical dynamic he called “the double movement.” Even in the 19th Century, as the self-regulating
market spread around the globe, “a deep-seated movement sprang into being to
resist the pernicious effects of a market-controlled economy.” Sometimes called the “regulatory state,”
contemporary followers of Polanyi prefer the phrase, “the always embedded
market economy.” Political and cultural
action to shelter pre-capitalist institutions such as family and local
community from the traumas caused by the market would recreate a tolerable
balance. In his later work, Polanyi
emphasized his kinship with the widely discredited economics of Aristotle and he
affirmed Aristotlean concepts such as the “just price,” the “living wage,” and
“natural trade.”[14]
POLANYI AND
NISBET
The
influence of Polanyi on The Quest for Community is
clear. Robert Nisbet adopted Polanyi’s
view of centralizing government as the handmaiden—rather than the foe—of the
market society. Nisbet agreed that the
self-regulating market was inconsistent with a sustainable social order, that
an unbridled market would lead to the demolition of human society. Nisbet also agreed with Polanyi that true
liberty required the aggressive defense of pre-capitalist, natural
institutions such as family, religious community, neighborhood, and trade union
(or guild).
Polanyi’s
influence also allows us to understand the otherwise peculiar and seemingly
contradictory central recommendation that Nisbet makes near the end of The
Quest for Community. Nisbet
writes:
I cannot help thinking that what we need above
all else in this age is a new philosophy of laissez faire. The old laissez faire failed because
it was based on erroneous premises regarding human behavior….Far from proving a
check upon the growth of the omnicompetent State, the old laissez faire
actually accelerated this growth.
Nisbet continues:
To create conditions within which autonomous
groups may prosper must be, I believe, the prime objective of the new laissez
faire….What we need at the present time is the knowledge and administrative
skill to create a laissez faire in which the basic unit will be the
social group.[15]
If we understand the phrase laissez faire in
its common meaning of “leave things alone” and “liberty”, then Nisbet’s
call—under the laissez faire label—for new rounds of state policies and
“administrative” skills to encourage natural social groups makes no
sense. However, if we understand laissez
faire as dissected by Polanyi—that is, as an aggressive effort at social
engineering by idealists using the power of the state—then Nisbet’s
recommendation for a new laissez faire becomes logical. To temper and undo the damage caused by the
unleashed self-regulating market, Nisbet summons us to craft laws and policies and
cultural mechanisms to protect and encourage the natural family and other
natural communities. He seeks to secure
“the always embedded market economy,” where legal, social, and cultural
barriers might shelter the essential institutions of human life.
So
what intellectual and political label shall we give to the Robert Nisbet found
in The
Quest for Community?
To begin with, we need note
that Nisbet did not write Quest for Community as a
conservative. As he reports in a later
volume: “My Quest for Community came out in 1953; I had not particularly
written it as a conservative book, but when it was so judged, I did not
appeal.”[16] Along with Richard Weaver and Kirk, Nisbet
brought to the mid-century American intellectual ferment a distrust of
modernity and a keen awareness of the need for eternal vigilance toward the
“creative destruction” of capitalism.
It was other writers, notably Frank Meyer, who used certain Nisbet-like
themes to cobble together the fusionist project.
So
too, Nisbet was clearly not a prototype of a genial fusionist
conservative. Market liberalism,
the pure market society, the self-regulating market: these were not his friendly
allies in building a free and ordered society.
Rather, Nisbet saw them as the central problems to be faced. And, in later life, he still held to this
view. Nisbet’s 1986 treatise, entitled Conservatism,
chastised Edmund Burke for his favorable references to the “eternal” laws of
commerce, adding: “But Burke aside, criticism of capitalism, of the new
economic order generally, is rife in nineteenth century conservative writing.”[17]
It is
here, in a conservatism of an older sort, that we find Nisbet’s authentic roots. As a sociologist, his early subjects and inspirations
were the French Catholic reactionaries of the early 19th century:
Vicomte Louis de Bonald; Chateaubriand; Joseph-Marie Comte de Maistre. Through them, Nisbet grounded his thought on
the foundation of natural law, in the heritage of Thomas Aquinas and, indeed,
in Aristotle. Following World War II,
Nisbet saw the necessary conservative task to be the defense of small,
natural institutions from the revolution implicit in the phrase, “self-regulating
market,” as well as from that other and nastier materialistic perversion of natural
society called Marxism-Leninism.
Nisbet’s
special style of conservatism also derived from his emphasis on the power of
ideas. He denied the materialism
of both the Marxists and the Manchester and Austrian liberals. Even a “market society,” he said, was the
product of ideas harnessed to political power, not the result of historical
determinism, the natural order, or some social evolution. In Quest for Community, he summoned a
new “knowledge,” a fresh set of “ideas,” that could defend natural human
bonds.
Well,
is there still a way to include The Quest for Community in the
fusionist Conservative Canon? Perhaps
so, but only if we envision fusionism differently then commonly supposed. Let us return to that image of Russell Kirk
and Ludwig von Mises in their two-man scull, in this case tag-teaming Nisbet in
for Kirk. This fusionist boat
would not be noted for its serenity.
Rather, Nisbet would have been out on the water earlier in the morning,
marking off large areas into which von Mises and his theories might never go: family relations; religious authority and
truths; the bonds of village and neighborhood; cooperatives; and workers’
associations. And, in his own genial
way, Nisbet would also be continually warning and cajoling von Mises about the
dangers lurking within his free market.
Nisbet would insist that the productive wonders of capitalism be
tempered and restrained by revealed truth, moral sensibility, humane learning,
and healthy tradition. Whenever the
market system seriously clashed with natural institutions, Nisbet would insist
that the market give way. Von Mises would fret and fume about inefficiencies,
rent seeking, statism, and dangers to personal liberty. The arguments
would be boisterous and sustained. And yet, somehow, this noisy little
fusionist boat would still manage to glide through the water, admired by those
who saw her from a distance.
As
this very ISI session indicates, Robert Nisbet’s work enjoys in our time
continued, even growing, interest and respect. The Quest for Community, in particular, cuts to the very heart
of modern discontents, as effectively in 2005 as it did back in 1953.
Not
coincidentally, perhaps, Karl Polanyi is also in the ascendance today. After decades of relative obscurity,
The
Great Transformation, in one scholars words, “is increasingly
recognized as one of the major works of twentieth-century social science. It is an indispensable reference in current
debates about globalization and it has achieved the status of a canonical work
for economic sociology and international political economy.”[18] It would probably be stretching matters to
claim this book for the Conservative Canon, as well. All the same, in his appeal to the worldview of Aristotle, in his
insistence on the power of ideas, and in his affection for the natural
bonds of family and community, Polanyi shares much with the young Robert Nisbet,
as the latter fully understood.
Endnotes:
