• Robert Higgs: Against Leviathan – Government Power and a Free Society; Independent Institute; 2004; 405pp.; $18.95
Readers familiar with the writings of the 16th century English philosopher Thomas Hobbes will immediately understand the thrust of this exceptional book. Hobbes attempted to justify an all-powerful state as being necessary if human beings were to avoid the supposed terrors of “the state of nature.” He called his model government (an unlimited monarchy) the Leviathan. Like many moderns, Hobbes erred in simultaneously overestimating the problems with freedom and underestimating the problems of government. The U.S. Constitution was, of course, an effort to avoid the Leviathan state by placing strict limits on governmental authority. Alas, constitutional restraints on governmental authority have been largely eviscerated by Supreme Court justices sympathetic to the socialistic vision of a highly planned and regulated society and we have been moving toward Leviathan for more than a century.
Historian Robert Higgs is as steadfast an opponent of governmental interference with liberty as one will ever find. In Against Leviathan, he has collected 40 of his trenchant essays that deal with a wide array of topics pertaining to state power. As Higgs explains in his introduction, he has arrived at the conclusion that government in the United States is mostly a useless, parasitic growth that thrives only because few people are able to see through its web of deception.
I defy anyone to read the book and then provide a serious argument that all the politicians and bureaucrats who to such a great extent now run our lives are doing so because they’re so committed to making life better for all of us. Our latter-day Hobbesians will shrink away from this book like vampires from garlic.
Against Leviathan is divided into seven sections: Welfare Statism, Our Glorious Leaders, Despotism, Soft and Hard, Economic Disgraces, The Political Economy of Crisis, Retreat of the State? and Review of the Troops. It wouldn’t be possible to do justice to the scope of Higgs’ erudition even if I had a whole issue of Carolina Journal. All I can do is to provide a tour through some of the material I find most striking.
The first essay in the book is a well-chosen initial broadside. In “Is More Economic Equality Better?” Higgs takes on one of the central assumptions of modern liberalism, namely that the closer to perfect equality in individual wealth and income in a society, the more just it is.
Higgs shows that there could be numerous reasons for an increase in equality (he devises seven scenarios, but there could be far more) all of which would be undesirable except for the ridiculous allure of egalitarianism. He concludes by nailing down the intellectual error that underlies the mania for income equality, namely the anthropomorphosis of society. That is, viewing society as if it were a human being itself, capable of moral choice and action.
The book’s section on “Our Glorious Leaders” will provoke plenty of outrage among conventional historians, for Higgs throws down the gauntlet to their penchant for regarding as “great” presidents who were stupendous failures. Franklin D. Roosevelt has been turned into a revered figure by admiring statists. Textbooks covering American history in the 20th century invariably fawn over FDR’s supposed achievements. I’d dearly love to sneak a copy of Higgs’ chapter “The Mythology of Roosevelt and the New Deal” into every American history text.
The students would discover that FDR was nothing more than a political conniver who “did not trouble himself with serious thinking.”
Surveying the political landscape he has so ably painted, Higgs is not optimistic about our future. The culture of obedience to Big Government is, he fears, too deeply imbedded in America for there to be much hope of a return to a free society.
He says, in my view correctly, that “few people in the United States today really give a damn about living as free men and women.”
“After a century of fighting a losing battle against their own governments, the American people have finally accepted that the best course open to them is simply to label their servitude as freedom and concentrate on enjoying the creature comforts that the government still permits them to possess.”
Still, there is a Nockian Remnant in America, trying hard to convince the rest of the populace that Big Government is a snare and a delusion. With Against Leviathan, Bob Higgs has made that task a bit easier.
George C. Leef is executive director of the Pope Center for Higher Education Policy.