RALEIGH – Frank Meyer is a name that should be familiar to every serious student of American politics and political philosophy. Alas, I fear it is not. One of the original writing talents at William F. Buckley’s National Review, Frank Meyer (1909-1972) edited the “back of the book” – reviews, arts, and letters – and had a long-running column, “Principles and Heresies.” He was also arguably the primary public philosopher for what would become the modern conservative movement in America. His argument for the compatibility, indeed the mutual necessity, of the libertarian and traditionalist strains within the American Right came to be known as fusionism, though Meyer never used the term.
In the course of gathering my research for a new book on the subject of reconciling liberty and virtue in politics, I have just finished reading a fascinating biography, Principles and Heresies: Frank S. Meyer and the Shaping of the American Conservative Movement, and am currently re-reading the Liberty Fund’s nice edition of a collection of Meyer’s works, including the seminal In Defense of Freedom: A Conservative Credo. One clue that you are reading a masterful work of political philosophy is how many times you are tempted to bend down the pages to come back to original, or at least quotable, insights. I’m finding myself dog-earing nearly every other page.
One of Meyer’s lines of inquiry has to do with what he considers the great philosophical mistake enshrined in the term “social science.” Exploring the nature of humanity through careful study of such fields as history, politics, economics, and psychology is fundamentally different from exploring the structure of the material world, the laws of motion, or the nature of plants and animals, Meyer argues. Human beings are sentient, purposeful, and endowed with free will. While certain aspects of human behavior can be measured and evaluated with the same tools used by natural scientists, the “social scientist” makes the mistake of assuming that these tools can bore into the core of the subject, the inner life of the human individual.
The resulting scientism, as Meyer terms it, has infected not just the professoriate – though he does have some devastating take-downs of academic political scientists, whom he dismisses as either “political tough-guys” (Realpolitikers) or “statisticians” – but also such fields as journalism and politics itself. Those who see political science as only “an analysis of what is, that it has no relationship to moral or philosophical inquiry” have defined away the relevance of, say, John Locke, in favor of “the empirical and naturalistic positions of Machiavelli and Hobbes.”
Not one to make a small point when a larger one will suffice, Meyer believes that the encroachment of scientism into the humanities helped to set the stage for the 20th century scourges of welfare statism and totalitarianism. Both are predicated on the fiction that society is an organism, an entity conjured like a genie out of relationships among free, autonomous individuals of equal moral worth. Scientism has propagated this fiction, he argues. Particles such as electrons and neutrons may form atoms, and atoms molecules; but the analogy does not apply to human beings, who never lose their individuality either in a fuzzy sphere of orbiting particles or an unfathomably dense nucleus.
I don’t know that I entirely buy Meyer’s line of thought here, but I can’t stop thinking about it. That’s the mark of an enduring work of scholarship – and an enduring scholar.
Hood is president of the John Locke Foundation.