The wonderful thing about Hegelianism as a “theory” of history is that it can be shaped to suit almost any particular political agenda one wishes. If you can formulate a thesis and antithesis so that your political program emerges as the synthesis of the two, then you can read all of history backward — a story inevitably leading to its stirring climax: the triumph of your ideology.
The Ideas That Conquered the World is such a reading of the past, intended to support what the author, who teaches foreign policy at Johns Hopkins University and is a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, calls “the liberal theory of history.” However, it is not so much a “theory of history” as a riffling through the last century or two to discover events that lend support to Wilsonian social democracy. Mandelbaum presents a “triad” of policies fundamental to his vision of liberalism: democracy, free markets, and disarmament-collective security.
However, he does not coherently articulate the meaning of any one of his triad’s elements. For instance, Mandelbaum asserts that the “liberal” approach to international relations is the “configuration of all… military forces so that they are suitable for defense but not for attack.” Such a policy has been adopted fully, he says, “only [by] the countries of Europe and North America.”
Does Mandelbaum really believe that the military forces of the United States currently are configured only for defense? Since World War II, no foreign government has attacked American territory, yet the United States has intervened militarily in other countries more than 60 times. One might applaud those interventions as necessary for the good of the liberal world order, but to call all of them “defensive” seems so to stretch the application of that word as to render it meaningless. If the U.S. invasion of Panama in 1989 can be called “defensive,” what war cannot?
Nor does Mandelbaum offer any argument as to why democracy is inherently liberal. He asserts that democracy involves “restraints on the exercise of power by governments,” but he does not explain how or why that is so. If democracy simply means that a government should perform only those actions that are approved by the majority of its citizens, as Mandelbaum implies, then it limits government only to doing whatever the majority approves, however illiberal it might be.
Mandelbaum’s version of “free markets” is a sadly attenuated version of the classical liberal policy of laissez faire. Rather than recognizing that free markets are what occur when coercion and central planning are absent, he believes that free markets must be “constructed” and “maintained,” and that such construction and maintenance are “far more difficult than had been imagined for most of the modern era.”
Mandelbaum says “the rise of the welfare state… made popular sovereignty through universal suffrage compatible with the protection of private property by giving every citizen property in the form of an entitlement to benefits from the state.” In other words, “private property” is “protected” by being subject to arbitrary confiscation by the majority of voters. While Man-delbaum asserts that modern social democracies establish zones that are “off limits to the exercise of government power,” he gives no indication as to what the boundaries of such “zones” might be. He tries to calm the fears of classical liberals by contending: “In the twentieth century… liberty and political equality proved to be compatible in Britain and the United States and throughout the Western core.” However, many classical liberals might contend that mass democracy has led to precisely the diminution of liberty that they predicted it would.
While purportedly a supporter of free markets, Mandelbaum does not seem to realize the fundamental flaw of socialism: the absence of any means by which to calculate economic success. He contends that while the command economy was “not necessarily superior to the market, [it] did work.” As evidence he cites the facts that in socialist regimes “people migrated in large numbers from the countryside to the cities” and “governments built, owned, and managed huge industrial complexes.” It is hard to imagine why these are indicators of an economy “working.”
The Ideas That Conquered the World is a salient example of the tendency to herald whatever trends are currently ascendant, while ignoring any analysis of whether such trends are sustainable in the long run.