Religion and the foundation of liberalism: the case of the Mont Pelerin Society.
Hammond, J. Daniel ; Hammond, Claire H.
To deny that the end justifies the means is indirectly to assert
that the end in question is not the ultimate end, that the ultimate end
is itself the use of proper means.
--Milton Friedman, Capitalism and Freedom
When we say economism, we mean one of the forms of social
rationalism. ... We mean the incorrigible mania of making the means the
end, of thinking only of bread and never of those other things of which
the Gospel speaks.
--Wilhelm Ropke, A Humane Economy
The Mont Pelerin Society (MPS), the brainchild of F. A. Hayek, was
an attempt to reclaim and reenergize liberalism in light of the
intellectual onslaughts of socialism, communism, and Nazism in the first
part of the twentieth century. But in April 1947, as Hayek and his
fellow conferees departed the inaugural meeting of the society for their
homes in Europe and America, they were united more in their sense of
impending crisis from growing worldwide nationalism and state control
than in a shared understanding of the moral and philosophical
foundations of liberalism. The program of the Mont Pelerin meeting
included five sessions on economic issues such as monetary reform, trade
unions, and agricultural policy; two sessions on postwar Europe; and two
on historiography and politics. There was one session on liberalism and
Christianity, and four on the purpose and organization of the nascent MPS. The last five sessions proved to be contentious. In retrospect this
is not surprising, as these discussions went to the very nature and
purpose of a liberal association such as the MPS and of a liberal
political order. The question of the nature and purpose of liberalism
was not settled at the first MPS meeting, and we suspect that it remains
unsettled today.
After Hayek made opening remarks, a committee composed of himself,
Walter Eucken, H. D. Gideonse, Henry Hazlitt, Carl Iverson, and John
Jewkes (1) prepared a document stating organizational aims for the
permanent body. The document failed to gain sufficient support for
adoption, and Lionel Robbins was asked to write a second draft.
Robbins's version was adopted and remained the society's only
official statement of aims for the organization. There has never been an
official MPS statement of a liberal creed. The MPS began as and remains
an organization committed to inquiry and discussion "among minds
inspired by certain ideals and broad conceptions held in common, to
contribute to the preservation and improvement of the free
society." (2)
What were the ideals and broad conceptions held in common? Our
thesis is that the original MPS members held less in common as to what
they were in favor of and why than on what they were opposed to. While
there was agreement that liberalism was important, there was not
agreement on the foundations of a liberal order or on the fundamental
reasons for its importance. Those assembled at Mont Pelerin were united
in opposition to communism and socialism. They were united in favor of
personal liberty and the prosperity that would result from competitive
capitalism. But they were not of one mind about the purpose that
liberalism serves--the end to which a liberal order is directed. For
that matter, they were not united on the purpose of prosperity. In terms
of the means and ends statements in our epigraphs, Friedman's comes
closer than Ropke's in representing a de facto Mont Pelerin credo.
Ropke's statement is indicative of the fact that exploration
of the foundations and ultimate purpose of a liberal order leads into
metaphysical and religious territory. The 1947 Mont Pelerin conferees
were not prepared to go there. To illustrate the hazards of metaphysics
and religion we will examine the two versions of the statement of aims
that were considered at Mont Pelerin, along with contemporaneous writings of Hayek and three other charter members of the MPS. Our
selection of the three--Wilhelm Ropke, Frank H. Knight, and Milton
Friedman--is based on their views of the roles of religion (ends) and of
science (means) in the task of rebuilding liberalism. Hayek is the most
important of the three, because the meeting was his brainchild. Ropke,
Knight, and Friedman are not as important as individuals for our
purposes as they are as types of viewpoints in the early MPS.
In his History of the Mont Pelerin Society, Max Hartwell suggests
that the reason the statement of aims drafted by the committee fell
short of adoption may have been that it was either too uncompromising
and overly specific or too long and diffuse (Hartwell, 40). The
committee's version, however, is not longer by much than
Robbins's second draft, and at first glance is not substantially
different in content.
We begin with a look at Robbins's statement of aims, the one
that was adopted. It opens by identifying "the crisis of our
times":
Central values of civilization are in danger. Over large stretches
of the earth's surface the essential conditions of human dignity
and freedom have already disappeared. In others they are under
constant menace from the development of current tendencies of
policy. The position of the individual and the voluntary group
are progressively undermined by extensions of arbitrary power. Even
the most precious possession of Western Man, freedom of thought and
expression. is threatened by the spread of creeds which, claiming
the privilege of tolerance when in the position of a minority,
seek only to establish a position of power in which they can
suppress and obliterate all views hut their own. (Harrwell, 41)
Robbins's statement identifies causes of the crisis: "the
growth of a view of history which denies all absolute moral
standards"; "the growth of theories which question the
desirability of the rule of law"; and "a decline of belief in
private property and the competitive market" (Hartwell, 41). Having
identified the crisis and its causes, the statement lists areas in which
further study is needed to counter illiberal ideology:
1. Analysis and explanation of the nature of the present crisis so
as to bring home to others its essential moral and economic origins.
2. Redefinition of the functions of the state so as to distinguish
more clearly between the totalitarian and the liberal order.
3. Methods of reestablishing the rule of law and of assuring its
development in such a manner that individuals and groups are not in a
position to encroach upon the freedom of others and private rights are
not allowed to become a basis of predatory power.
4. The possibility of establishing minimum standards by means not
inimical to initiative and the functioning of the market.
5. Methods of combating the misuse of history for the furtherance of creeds hostile to liberty.
6. The problem of the creation of an international order conducive
to the safeguarding of peace and liberty and permitting the
establishment of harmonious international economic relations. (Hartwell,
41-42)
Following this list of areas for further study the statement
concludes with a disclaimer of interest in establishing a liberal
orthodoxy or in aligning with any particular political party.
Where Robbins's statement begins with a description of the
"crisis of our times," the first draft, the one that was not
adopted, opens with a statement of purpose for the assembly "to
discuss the foundations for the preservation of a free society" and
lists a set of ten convictions shared by those present:
1. Individual freedom can be preserved only in a society in which
an effective competitive market is the main agency for the direction of
economic activity.
2. The freedom of the consumer in choosing what he shall buy, the
freedom of the producer in choosing what he shall make, and the freedom
of the worker in choosing his occupation and his place of employment are
essential not merely for the sake of freedom itself, but for efficiency
in production.
3. All rational men believe in planning for the future. But this
involves the right of each individual to plan his own life.
4. The decline in competitive markets and the movement toward
totalitarian control of society are not inevitable. They are the result
mainly of mistaken beliefs about the appropriate means for securing a
free and prosperous society and of the policies based on these beliefs.
5. The preservation of an effective competitive order depends upon
a proper legal and institutional framework.
6. As far as possible government activity should be limited by the
rule of law. Government action can be made predictable only when it is
bound by fixed rules.
7. The changes in current opinion which are responsible for the
trend toward totalitarianism are not confined to economic doctrines.
They are part of a movement of ideas which find expression also in the
field of morals and philosophy and in the interpretation of history.
Those who wish to resist the encroachments on individual liberty must
direct their attention to these wide areas as well as to those in the
strictly economic field.
8. Any free society presupposes, in particular, a widely accepted
moral code. The principles of this moral code should govern collective
no less than private action.
9. Among the most dangerous of the intellectual errors which lead
to the destruction of a free society is the historical fatalism which
believes in our power to discover laws of historical development which
we must obey, and the historical relativism which denies all absolute
moral standards and tends to justify any political means by the purposes
at which it aims.
10. Political pressures have brought new and serious threats to the
freedom of thought and science. Complete intellectual freedom is so
essential to the fulfillment of all our aims that no consideration of
social expediency must ever be allowed to impair it. (Hartwell, 49-50)
Much of Robbins's draft is simply a rearrangement of the
contents of the statement drafted by the committee. He took several
items from the list of ten "shared convictions" and placed
them in preamble paragraphs before the list of six "areas for
study." This rearrangement, truncation of the list, and conversion
of "shared convictions" to "areas for study" may be
what led Hartwell to suggest that the Robbins draft was less
uncompromising and specific. The first six of the ten "shared
convictions" in the first draft concerned economic and legal
issues. They were followed by four moral and philosophical convictions.
Robbins also changed the opening sentence of the statement from "a
group of students of society met at Mont Pelerin ... to discuss the
foundations for the preservation of a free society" to "a
group of economists, historians, philosophers and other students of
public affairs from Europe and the United States met at Mont Pelerin ...
to discuss the crisis of our times." This is perhaps indicative of
a shift in emphasis from questions of philosophical and moral
foundations of liberal ism to the more practical and strategic question
of how to preserve the liberal order in a time of crisis.
In his opening remarks at the Mont Pelerin conference, before the
two statements of aims were drafted, Hayek stressed the importance of
discussion among people from diverse professional fields and places who
held in common the values at the core of true liberalism:
The basic conviction which has guided me in my efforts is that,
if the ideals which I believe unite us, and for which, in spite
of so much abuse of the term, there is still no better name than
liberal, are to have any chance of revival, a great intellectual
task must be performed. This task involves both purging liberal
theory of certain accidental accretions which have become
attached to it in the course of time, and also facing up to some
real problems which an over-simplified liberalism has shirked or
which have become apparent only since it has turned into a
somewhat stationary and rigid creed. (3)
He proposed three topics that might have generated discussion of
fundamental principles: the relation between "free enterprise"
and a competitive order; die interpretation and teaching of history; and
the relationship between liberalism and Christianity. Two additional
topics concerned practical applications of liberal principles: the
future of Germany and prospects for a European federation. Beyond these
suggestions, Hayek left the bulk of the program to be determined during
the ten conference days. It turned out that the mix of sessions at Mont
Pelerin was weighted toward economics, reflecting the greater number of
economists than historians and political philosophers who were in
attendance. There were five sessions on economic topics, one on
historiography and political education, and one session on liberalism
and Christianity.
Hayek's interest in having a session on liberalism and
Christianity came from his perception that German resistance to Hitler
was concentrated among Catholics, and furthermore that in Europe and in
America liberalism had become associated with an extreme and aggressive
atheistic rationalism. The mixture of liberalism with atheistic
rationalism led some nonreligious liberals to embrace
"scientific" socialism and nationalism. Hayek also thought
that in Europe more so than in America, the association of liberalism
with atheism repelled some religious believers who might have been
liberals. These people were likely to find intellectual and spiritual
succor in reactionary conservative groups. (4) Hayek told the audience
that "I am convinced that unless this breach between true liberal
and religious convictions can be healed there is no hope for a revival
of liberal forces" (Hayek, "Opening Address," 155).
In the mid-1940s, as Hayek conceived the plan to bring liberals
together, he thought Europeans had lost their civilization. They had
done so through intellectual and moral apostasy. Historians, for
example, sought to turn history into a value-free scientific enterprise
but in practice let history become the servant of nationalistic pride
and prejudices. Hayek wrote in The Road to Serfdom (5) of the prophetic
vision of Julien Benda's Trahison des Clercs (6) (published in the
United States as The Treason of the Intellectuals). He quoted Benda
concerning the
superstition of science held to be competent in all domains,
including that of morality; a superstition which, I repeat,
is an acquisition of the nineteenth century. It remains to
discover whether those who brandish this doctrine believe in
it or whether they simply want to give the prestige of a
scientific appearance to passions of their hearts, which they
perfectly know are nothing but passions. It is to be noted
that the dogma that history is obedient to scientific laws
is preached especially by partisans of arbitrary authority.
(Hayek. 191)
Hayek found an example of the treason of the intellectuals in J. G.
Crowther's The Social Relations of Science, (7) in which, according
to Hayek, there is a "hatred of almost everything which
distinguishes Western civilization since the Renaissance. ... combined
with an approval of the methods of Inquisition" (Hayek, 1944, 192).
"This view," wrote Hayek, "is, of course, practically
indistinguishable from the views which led the Nazis to the persecution
of men of science, the burning of scientific books, and the systematic
eradication of the intelligentsia of the subjected people" (Hayek,
1944, 164).
In 1944, the same year that The Road to Selfdom was published,
Hayek read a paper on "Historians and the Future of Europe" to
the Political Society at King's College, Cambridge. His thesis was
that the future of Europe hinged on the future of postwar Germany, and
that Germany's future depended on whether historians (by which he
meant students of society past or present) served the cause of truth or
the cause of nationalistic passions:
The best we can hope, and all we from the outside can
usefully work for, is that the history which is to
influence the course of German opinions will be
written in a sincere effort to find out the truth,
subservient to no authority, no nation, race or
class. History must above all cease to be an
instrument of national policy.
The most difficult thing to re-create in Germany will
be the belief in the existence of an objective truth,
of the possibility of a history which is not
written in the service of a particular interest. (8)
Germans had been tragically disserved by historians who thought it
outside their province to make moral judgments, who restricted their
efforts to "explanation." "It was these scientific
historians as much as their political colleagues who inculcated the
Germans with the belief that political acts cannot be measured by moral
standards, and even that the ends justify the means" (Hayek,
"Historians and the Future of Europe," 141).
Hayek offered Lord John Acton as the model historian, in contrast
to the practitioner of "scientific history." He saw Acton as
the last of the great "Whig historians" who understood that
moral values are not incompatible with pursuit of the truth. A program
to unite Germans with Englishmen in moral and political values conducive
to a liberal society, thought Hayek, might be built around the person of
Acton--an Acton Society. Acton was attractive for this purpose because
he was an Englishman who was educated and trained in Germany and because
he was a devout Catholic, but a Catholic who did not hesitate to
criticize the church:
More important even it is that among the real
opposition to Hitler in Germany the Catholics have
played such an important part that no organization
which, without being itself Roman Catholic, is not at
least of such a character as to make it possible for
a devout Catholic to collaborate, can hope to gain
influence among the great middle groups upon which
the success of its efforts will so much depend.
(Hayek, "Historians and the Future of Europe," 143)
Hayek suggested that if one were to identify a liberal society with
individuals other than Acton, the Swiss historian Jakob Burckhardt and
Frenchman Alexis de Tocqueville would fit the bill. These three,
according to Hayek, "continued the tradition of the great political
philosopher who, as Acton said, at his best was England at its
best'--Edmund Burke" ("Historians and the Future of
Europe," 144).
To illustrate Acton's commitment to truth and moral standards,
Hayek quoted from his letter to Bishop Mandell Creighton (9) (1887) that
includes the famous line about the corrupting influence of power:
If there is any presumption, it is the other way,
against the holders of power, increasing as the power
increases. Historic responsibility has to make up for
the want of legal responsibility. Power tends to
corrupt and absolute power tends to corrupt
absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men, even
when they exercise influence and not authority, still
more when you super-add the tendency or certainty of
corruption by authority. There is no worse heresy than
that the office sanctifies the holder of it. That is
the point at which the negation of Catholicism and the
negation of Liberalism meet and keep high festival. ...
The inflexible integrity of the moral code is to me, the
secret of the authority, the dignity, the utility of
history." ("Historians and the Future of Europe," 145)
The Mont Pelerin conference session on liberalism and Christianity
was chaired by economist Walter Eucken, with opening remarks by American
agnostic and anti-Catholic Frank H. Knight, also an economist. The
records of this session are not available. Hartwell reports, however,
that two decades later, in planning for the 1967 meeting at Vichy,
France, Bruno Leoni and Arthur Shenfield were keen to have a session on
the relationship between religion and liberty. (10) (Neither Leoni nor
Shenfield had attended the Mont Pelerin meeting in 1947.) The society
had avoided this topic, notes Hartwell, "since Knight had so
vigorously debunked religion at the 1947 meeting." (11)
With attention to their other writings, however, we can identify
the types of arguments that would have been aired in the 1947 session.
Clearly, Hayek was of the opinion that liberalism needed to be rebuilt
from the ground up in order to present an effective counter to the
intellectual currents that had brought Western civilization to the
"crisis of our times." The new liberalism would have to be
built on sound moral and philosophical underpinnings. Liberalism had
historically been based on Christian humanism. Although Hayek was a
religious skeptic, he understood Christianity's role in the
formation of a culture of liberalism, and he understood the inadequacy
of science as a replacement for religion in support of liberal
institutions.
Other liberals who shared Hayek's concern over the moral and
philosophical foundations of liberalism viewed Christianity as being
essential to the endeavor. Eucken, who chaired the session, thought
Christianity was compatible with competitive capitalism. Economist
William A. Orton had been invited to Mont Pelerin but declined because
of teaching responsibilities. (12) His 1945 book, The Liberal Tradition:
A Study of the Social and Spiritual Conditions of Freedom, gives an
extensive analysis of what he considered the necessary connection
between liberalism and Christianity. (13) Economist Wilhelm Ropke held
views similar to Orton's with respect to the need for liberalism to
recover its Christian humanism. Frank Knight agreed that moral and
philosophical foundations were necessary. Knight also shared
Hayek's understanding of the inadequacy of science to replace
religion as the basis of liberalism. However, Knight was a religious
skeptic whose understanding of the role of religion in Western
civilization was much darker than Ropke's (or Orton's) and
darker than Hayek's as well. So, if we were to place the various
views on the importance of Christian religious values to liberalism on a
spectrum, Frank Knight would be at one extreme, with Ropke on the other.
In between would be someone like Milton Friedman. He represents the role
of the liberal as social scientist; someone who is neutral if not
indifferent to the question of religion and liberalism. Not being of a
particularly philosophical bent, Friedman saw the hope for liberalism in
better social science and social science education.
Wilhelm Ropke was, with Walter Eucken, one of the founders of the
German Ordoliberalism. Ropke was the second president of the MPS,
replacing Hayek in 1960. He resigned from the society in December 1961,
citing ill health, but he was also in the middle of a bitter internal
dispute known as the Hunold Affair. (14) Ropke wrote several books on
the crisis of European civilization in the years just before and after
the first Mont Pelerin meeting. The first chapter of Ropke's A
Humane Economy is a retrospective on the problems addressed in several
of these works. (15) Ropke had some difficulty identifying his political
ideology. What his ideology was not was clearer to him than what it was.
Along with his Mont Pelerin compatriots, Ropke was certain that he was
not a socialist. But he did not think his opposition to socialism
necessarily made him a liberal.
He asked, "Where does a man of my kind take his stand if he is
to attack socialism because he believes it to be wrong?" (Ropke,
Humane Economy, 3). He concluded that he was a liberal with regard to
social technique--believing in free cooperation through private property
and markets and opposing central planning. That is, he favored a liberal
economic order. But the reason for this preference was not that a
liberal economic order was more productive than central planning.
Ropke's preference was based on humanistic principles of social
philosophy that he believed were more important than material
productivity. He thought a liberal market order was compatible and
socialism incompatible with these principles. But these same humanistic
principles left Ropke less than fully comfortable being identified as a
liberal:
The true reason [for my preference for a liberal
economic order] lies deeper, in those levels where
each man's social philosophy is rooted. And here I am
not at all sure that I do not belong to the
conservative rather than the liberal camp, in so far
as I dissociate myself from certain
principles of social philosophy which, over long
stretches of the history of thought, rested on common
foundations with liberalism and socialism, or at
least accompanied them. I have in mind such "isms" as
utilitarianism, progressivism, secularism,
rationalism, optimism, and what Eric Voegelin aptly
calls "immanentism" or "social gnosticism." (Ropke,
Humane Economy, 3-4)
The "isms" shared by socialism and certain strands of
liberalism were antithetical to Ropkes humanism. He thought they tended
toward totalitarianism. The key historical manifestation of liberalism
become totalitarianism was the Jacobinism of the French Revolution.
Ropke viewed this type of venture in mass democracy as the enemy of
humanism:
As far as I myself am concerned, what I reject in
socialism is a philosophy which, any "liberal"
phraseology it may use notwithstanding, places too
little emphasis on man, his nature, and his
personality and which, at least in its enthusiasm
for anything that may be described as organization,
concentration, management, and administrative
machinery, makes light of the danger that all this
may lead to the sacrifice of freedom in the plain
and tragic sense exemplified by the totalitarian
state. My picture of man is fashioned by the
spiritual heritage of classical and Christian
tradition. I see in man the likeness of God; I am
profoundly convinced that it is an appalling sin to
reduce man to a means (even in the name of high
sounding phrases) and that each man's soul is
something unique, irreplaceable, priceless, in
comparison with which all other things are as
naught. I am attached to a humanism which regards
man as the child and image of God, but not as God
himself, to be idolized as he is by the hubris of a
false and atheist humanism. These, I believe, are the
reasons why I so greatly distrust all forms of
collectivism. (Ropke, Humane Economy, 4-5)
So, for Ropke, a liberal economic order was not an end in itself
but a means to a higher end--"a higher order of things which is not
ruled by supply and demand, free prices, and competition"--the
realm of human nature fashioned by God in His image (Ropke, Humane
Economy, 6). The cure for the crisis of modern civilization would not be
found in any system or set of institutions. For the crisis was not a
crisis of social mechanisms but of the human soul:
This brings me to the very center of my
convictions, which, I hope, I share with many
others. I have always been reluctant to talk about
it because I am not one to air my religious views
in public, but let me say it here quite plainly:
the ultimate source of our civilization's disease
is the spiritual and religious crisis which has
overtaken all of us and which each must master for
himself. Above all, man is Homo religious, and yet
we have, for the past century, made the desperate
attempt to get along without God, and in the place
of God we have set up the cult of man, his profane
or even ungodly science and art, his technical
achievements, and his State. We may be certain that
some day the whole world will come to see, in a
blinding flash, what is now clear to only a few,
namely, that this desperate attempt has created a
situation in which man cannot live at all for any
length of time, in spite of television and
speedways and holiday trips and comfortable
apartments. We seem to have proved the
existence of God in yet another way: by the practical
consequences of His presumed non-existence. (Ropke,
Humane Economy, 8)
Ropke may have thought that solutions to the crisis were not to be
found in institutional change, but he did not think that institutions
were without importance. Institutions could have effects on the human
soul. He worried specifically that modern industrial and urban life
contributed to a presumption that it was within man's power to make
and alter anything, including himself. Cut off from nature and human
nature, modern man substituted in the place of God social
religions--socialism, communism, and nationalism.
Ropke's Humane Economy includes a chapter on "the
conditions and limits of the marker." The danger for economists, a
danger shared with other specialists, was narrowing their vision to the
confines of their discipline and treating all of social life as nothing
more than a web of market exchanges. By falling prey to social
rationalism, economists would, unknowingly perhaps, ally themselves with
the socialists. The antidote for this was self-restraint, keeping
uppermost in one's mind that markets are always embedded in social
structures and moral and spiritual settings. Among the social structures
that can fall out of sight not only for socialist planners but also for
"circular-flow technicians" is the important role of private
property. Private property is essential to a healthy society not just
because it allows exchange to occur, but for a deeper purpose:
The true role of ownership can be appreciated only if
we look upon it as representative of something far
beyond what is visible and measurable. Ownership
illustrates that the market economy is
a form of economic order belonging to a particular
philosophy of life and to a particular social and
moral universe. ... In all honesty, we have to
admit that the market economy has a bourgeois
foundation. This needs to be stressed all the more
because the romantic and socialist reaction against
everything bourgeois has, for generations past,
been astonishingly successful in turning the
concept into a parody of itself from which it is
very difficult to get away. ... This implies the
existence of a society in which certain
fundamentals are respected and color the whole
network of social relations: individual effort and
responsibility, absolute norms and values,
independence based on ownership, prudence and
daring, calculating and saving, responsibility for
planning one's own life, proper coherence with the
community, family feeling, a sense of tradition and
the succession of generations combined with an
open-minded view of the past and the future, proper
tension between the individual and community, firm
moral discipline, respect for the value of money,
the courage to grapple on one's own with life and
its uncertainties, a sense of the natural order of
things, and a firm scale of values. Whoever turns
up his nose at these things or suspects them of
being "reactionary" may in all seriousness be asked
what scale of values and what ideals he intends to
defend against Communism without having to borrow
from it. (Ropke, Humane Economy, 98)
So, for Ropke, the most important role of a liberal economic order
was to serve as a means to the higher, nonmaterial end of fulfilling
man's God-given potential as a human being.
Frank Knight, University of Chicago price theorist and historian of
economics, believed passionately that liberalism and religion were
incompatible. Knight was raised in a conservative Disciples of Christ family in rural Illinois and attended two Disciples of Christ colleges.
But Knight rejected his family's Christian faith as a young boy.
(16) His opposition to organized religion became as strong as his
commitment to liberalism. The core principle of liberalism for him was
free discussion. For discussion to be free there must not be an
imbalance of power between parties to the discussion and there must not
be any premise imposed on the discussion from the beginning. Everything
regarding the issue at hand must be open to the application of reason.
Liberalism, for Knight, boils down to the free use of reason by
individuals regarding all matters. This is why Knight thought liberalism
was incompatible with religion. Religion is based on authority,
ultimately on the authority of God, and proximately on the authority of
those to whom God delegates His authority--that is, priests and
ministers. Knight did not believe in God. Therefore he believed that
every god and the religion of every god were nothing more than human
constructs. Since in any religion some questions have already been
answered, and therefore closed, religion is inherently illiberal. The
more universal the religion and the more omnipotent and omniscient the
god, the less room there is for the liberal ideal of free discussion
among equals.
Knight thought that all religions were backward looking, their
adherents looking back to revealed truth and to an ideal state in the
past. Liberalism, on the other hand, looks ahead in the never-ending
pursuit of truth. Where religion is inherently conservative and
retrogressive, liberalism is progressive. Liberals also view history as
progressive, with potential for progress stretching indefinitely into
the future. The mechanism for progress is pursuit of truth via free and
open discussion and problem solving:
The religious mode of belief is defined by the fact
that the critical attitude toward serious matters
is sinful. This view of truth means in practice
that for any individual, whether priest or ordinary
citizen, truth is a matter of cultural inheritance.
... In our own tradition, intolerance is integral
to religious belief, as it must be, to some degree,
in a religion claiming universality.
In the liberal view of life, all this is of course
reversed. To begin with, liberalism repudiates the
idea that any truth is final or absolute; all
concrete beliefs are in varying degree subject to
reinterpretation, revision and eventual rejection
and replacement, in the light of new knowledge or
insight. Truth is an ideal rather than a reality,
something never possessed but to be approached by
criticism and critically directed effort. ... The
liberal view makes truth inherently dynamic and
progressive. (17)
We do not have a record of Knight's remarks in the session on
liberalism and Christianity at the Mont Pelerin meeting. But there may
be a proxy for these remarks in his 1947 review of William A.
Orton's The Liberal Tradition. (18) Orton, an Englishman and
Anglo-Catholic who taught at Smith College, wrote in response to
Hayek's invitation that he agreed with the idea of using Lord Acton
as the base for the liberal initiative. He suggested two topics for
discussion at the conference: the relation between liberalism and
democracy, especially with regard to American ideas of democracy, and
the conflict between free-trade internationalism and the restoration of
rural life in England, Hungary, and other European countries. The latter
issue, he suggested, was a conflict between economic and cultural
criteria of the good life. (19)
Orton's book was a historically oriented effort to identify
the fundamental principles of liberalism, written largely in response to
the twentieth century's rise of nationalism and two world wars (the
same issues giving rise to the Mont Pelerin meeting). Orton suggested
that the core of liberalism was in the classical Greek (Aristotelian)
and Christian synthesis that produced the idea of free individual
persons within community:
Liberty without community, community without liberty,
each is subhuman. The core of the liberal creed (it
was the supreme insight of the Greeks) is that in a
true community the members are truly free. Corn
munity is a working consensus of free minds and free
wills in which the individual lives spontaneously,
taking and giving much or little, but of his own
accord: as in true family, a true friendship, a true
cooperation. (Orton, Liberal Tradition, 19)
Orton found the source of genuine community in Christian precepts
of natural law and the Incarnation, and in particular in the
universalism of Catholic Christianity:
For between power and authority there is the same
sort of distinction as was later to be recognized
between possession and property. While power may
reside in persons or groups of persons, authority
does not. Persons may temporarily be able, rightly or
wrongly, to coerce other persons; but authority does
not inhere in human beings. ... So rulers and leaders
of men, desiring a stable basis for social order, are
impelled to seek the sanction
of something beyond the act of will, beyond local
considerations of interest or expediency.
For a thousand years all Europe sought that
sanction in the Catholic church; and in those parts
of the world which eventually rejected that
authority, appeal was made to one of two--as it
were, fragmentary--substitutes: either to state
establishments that retained a church but dropped
the catholicity, or to declarations of rights that
retained the catholicity (in theory at least) but
dropped the church. Each had its limitations; and
the two halves failed to make a whole. (Orton,
Liberal Tradition, 59-60)
Whereas Orton identified the core of liberalism in universal
Catholic Christianity, and its breakup a threat to liberalism, Knight
saw universal Catholic Christianity as totalitarian and its breakup as
liberating:
What history seems to show is that the multiplication
of fanaticisms was the only way in which Europe could
free itself from the Semitic-Asiatic tradition of one
sole creed and church for salvation, hence naturally
to be maintained and propagated without regard to
means or cost. Why anyone should want to go back--to
the Dark Age, the Crusades, the days of schism and
councils and Inquisition, or the Reformation and wars
of religion--is a mystery indeed. (Knight, "Short
Cuts to Justice and Happiness," 200-201)
Knight came close to suggesting that Orton was himself a
totalitarian wolf dressed up in sheep's clothing of "Christian
liberalism":
What he is finally advocating, the only position
which makes sense our of
his general argument, is a world-wide church-state
or superchurch-superstate, instructing and
commanding every individual and every voluntary,
cultural, institutional, political, or other group
as to the right thing to do and to think whether in
the name of God or the folk or the workers. Just
let everyone, from Spitzenbergen to Tierra del
Fuego, join the author's church, and bring up his
children under the direction of its priests, in
unquestioning "faith," loyalty, and obedience, and
all the world's problems will be solved. It might
be as simple as that--or as forcing all to join up
who proved too selfish, opinionated, or obstinate
to do so voluntarily. However, for reasons that
perhaps are not too hard to guess, the author does
not stare this argument explicitly. (Knight, "Short
Cuts to Justice and Happiness," 205)
Compare this assessment by Knight of a purported "fellow
liberal" with the passage from the Mont Pelerin statement of aims
as adopted:
The position of the individual and the voluntary
group are progressively undermined by extensions of
arbitrary power. Even the most precious possession of
Western Man, freedom of thought and expression, is
threatened by the spread of creeds which, claiming
the privilege of tolerance when in the position of a
minority, seek only to establish a position of power
in which they can suppress and obliterate all views
but their own." (Hartwell, History of the Mont
Pelerin Society, 41)
To Frank Knight, anyone who sought liberal values in organized
religion was sorely misguided. Christianity, no less than Nazism and
communism, tended to suppress all views but its own once it rose to a
position of power. This brings to the foreground one of the stumbling
blocks to discussion of the foundational issues--whether one believed or
did not believe in God and God's revelation to man. For Orton, as a
believer, the distinction between authority and power was essential.
Authority rested with God. For Knight, a religious skeptic, claims of
authority stopped at man and were thus diminished to mere power.
Milton Friedman represents what the MPS was to become, an
organization concerned with economic and political means to a liberal
order, but not with the philosophical and religious principles on which
such an order would be grounded. Friedman was one of four editors of the
collection of Frank Knight's papers published as The Ethics of
Competition in 1935. (20) But Friedman's professional focus before
Mont Pelerin was far removed from Knight's and Ropke's
concerns with the history of economics and social philosophy.
Friedman's interests were technical economics and statistics. There
is no evidence that he had an articulated political philosophy prior to
1947. His view of both economics and statistics was that they were
sciences, with science conceived in a loosely positivistic manner. The
role of the economic or statistical scientist was to provide technical
expertise for solving social problems.
Other than helping Homer Jones, George Stigler, and Alan Wallis
edit The Ethics of Competition, Friedman published nothing that would
indicate an affinity for classical liberalism until he collaborated with
George Stigler on Roofs or Ceilings? The Current Housing Problem. (21)
He and Stigler wrote this piece while together at the University of
Minnesota in the spring of 1946, a year before the Mont Pelerin meeting.
Stigler had written his doctoral dissertation under Knight's
direction. It is likely that the formation of Friedman's liberal
ideology began in the office he shared with Stigler at Minnesota, and
was nurtured by his experience at Mont Pelerin with Stigler, Knight, and
his brother-in-law, Aaron Director. Friedman's invitation to the
Mont Pelerin meeting was most likely due to Director, a close friend of
Hayek. (22)
Friedman was religious during his childhood until shortly after his
bar mitzvah. (23) As a teenager he abandoned the Jewish faith and
appears to have lived the rest of his life without any religion. But in
contrast with Frank Knight, Friedman's childhood within a religious
community left no emotional wounds.24 He seems to have been neither
appreciative nor wary of religion's effects on society. When
Friedman sailed to Europe for the Mont Pelerin meeting, he was an
economic and statistical scientist. Afterward he retained his core
identity as a scientist. But he became a scientist with a classical
liberal ideology. Unlike Ropke, whose liberalism was grounded in
classical philosophy and religion, Friedman's was cut from the
cloth of economics. His was in the traditions of the Benthamites and the
Manchester school--traditions that stressed the virtues of markets, free
trade, and small and decentralized government.
That Friedman had no animus toward religion can be seen in his
half-century-long advocacy for education vouchers. He wrote in 1955 that
he understood the concern expressed by supporters of public education
that widespread enrollment in parochial schools might impede formation
of common values across religious groups:
But it is by no means clear either that it is valid
or that the denationalizing of
education would have the effects suggested. On
grounds of principle, it conflicts with the
preservation of freedom itself; indeed, this conflict
was a major factor retarding the development of state
education in England. How [to] draw a line between
providing for the common social values required for a
stable society on the one hand, and indoctrination
inhibiting freedom of thought and belief on the
other? Here is another of those vague boundaries that
it is easier to mention than to define. (25)
Twenty years later, in 1975, Friedman defended the right of
citizens to use funds received from government for religious purposes,
including religious schooling:
Under the G.I. Bill, veterans are free to attend
Catholic or other religious colleges, and, so far
as I know, no First-Amendment issue has ever been
raised. Recipients of Social Security and welfare
payments are free to contribute to churches from
their government subsidies, with no First Amendment
question being asked.
Indeed, I believe that the penalty now imposed on
parents who do not send their children to public
schools produces a real violation of the spirit of
the First Amendment, whatever lawyers and judges
may decide about the letter. 'The penalty abridges
the religious freedom of parents who do not accept
the liberal humanistic religion of the public
schools, yet, because of the penalty, are impelled
to send their children to public schools. (26)
Rose Friedman says of her husband that after he lost his faith he
became "fanatically antireligious" (Friedman and Friedman, Two
Lucky People, 23). But if this was so, it was entirely a personal matter
for Friedman. The written evidence is that he viewed religion as a
private matter, neither essential nor hostile to the formation of
communities of free persons.
The preponderance of MPS sessions focused on economics rather than
on history, religion, culture, and political philosophy continued beyond
the 1947 meeting. At the second meeting, in 1949, Walter Eucken chaired
a session on "the proletarianized society," with Ropke as the
speaker. The other sessions were more strictly economic: "trade
unionism and the price system," "labor and management,"
"the demand for social security," "the unemployed and the
unemployable," and "the relation of the state to education and
research." Through the 1950s the sessions not strictly on economics
tended to be chaired and manned by a group of people that included
Ropke, Eucken, H. D. Gideonse, and Alexander Rustow. (27) Gideonse
chaired a session on "cultural and ideological aspects of
capitalism and socialism" at the 1950 meeting in Bloemendaal, the
Netherlands, with Ropke making a presentation on "progressive
ideologies." In another 1950 session, Gideonse presented on
"the moral basis of academic freedom," and in 1957 he chaired
a session on "the meaning of liberty and the philosophical basis of
liberalism." In 1953 Ropke presented a talk on "social
presuppositions of the market economy." He and Rostow presented on
"front-lines of freedom" and "human rights or human
duties" at the 1960 meeting in Kassel, Germany. Most of the
presentations in the 1950s, however, were on topics such as CC
"monetary and fiscal policy," "the nature and functions
of profits," "progressive taxation," "trade union
legislation," and "inflation."
This kept discussions on a somewhat superficial and material level.
Economic science could be brought to bear on questions of the price
system and the effects of public policies but not on foundational
questions about rights and obligations, community, culture, and morals.
Science could not resolve the question of what it meant to be a liberal
or why being a liberal mattered, beyond the material benefits from rule
of law and free markets. Yet the philosophical questions that economics
could not answer continued to hang over the MPS. Hayek himself was hard
pressed to identify his personal ideology in regard to the categories on
offer by the intellectual world in the mid-twentieth century. In the
conventional nomenclature, he was not a socialist, for sure, but he was
also not a progressive. He said at Mont Pelerin that for better or worse
he was a liberal, but he was aware that this label placed him among
unwanted company. He certainly did not say, "I am a
Christian."
Hayek grappled with this problem of identifying and naming the
political philosophy he had hoped the group assembled at Mont Pelerin
would embrace in his 1957 presidential address to the society. His title
was "Why I Am Not a Conservative." Hayek explained that the
essential attribute of adherents of his philosophy was to be a friend of
freedom. In the current political milieu, those who were friends of
freedom found themselves allied with conservatives. Thus Hayek's
felt need to distinguish his creed from conservatism. Friends of freedom
were forward-looking optimists; conservatives were backward-looking
pessimists. Friends of freedom were wary of authority; conservatives
were fond of it. Friends of freedom were people of principle;
conservatives were opportunists. Friends of freedom were
internationalists; conservatives tended to be nationalists.
For Hayek, even the label "liberal" had been tainted
through its adoption by American radicals and socialists. Neither they
nor most people who thought of themselves as progressives were friends
of freedom. "What I should want is a word which describes the party
of life, the party that favors free growth and spontaneous evolution.
But I have racked my brain unsuccessfully to find a descriptive term
which commends itself." (28) He regarded the liberalism of the
eighteenth-century English Whigs and James Madison, primary author of
the U.S. Constitution, as the apogee of his favored type of liberalism.
"Whiggism is historically the correct name for the ideas in which I
believe. The more I learn about the evolution of ideas, the more I have
become aware that I am simply an unrepentant Old Whig--with the stress
on the 'old'" (Hayek, "Why I Am Not a
Conservative," 409).
Wilhelm Ropke, as president of the MPS, delivered opening remarks
at the Turin, Italy, meeting in September 1961, less than a month after
East Berlin was sealed off from the West by the Soviets and GDR. Ropke
referred to the communist threat there, and in Italy where it appeared
that communists might come to power through democratic election, as
satanic, an adjective one does not come across frequently in the social
sciences. He asked, somewhat rhetorically, how Europe could have gotten
in such a situation:
It may dawn upon us now that we may live to see once
more confirmed a great truth of human history, namely
that suicide, not murder, is the normal form of death
of a cultural system. It is not the strength of the
barbarians but the weakness, moral and intellectual,
of the civilized which is usually their undoing. (29)
Ropke urged that the main task of the MPS was to combat moral and
intellectual confusion and a failure of will in Western democracies. He
could not claim with confidence that the society had been true to this
task. It is clear that Ropke was criticizing the society's heavy
reliance on social science in rebuilding liberalism:
Let us get to work, not in the ivory tower of scientific aloofness
and relativism, but keeping in mind that we are menaced by an
avalanche which would bury also science itself. ... And let us
avoid the mental disease of so many intellectuals who have forgotten
another word of wisdom, also due to [Georg Christoph] Lichtenbeg:
"One has to believe in certain ultimate values because it would be
absurd not to believe in them." (30)
Our examination of the ideas that were brought to Mont Pelerin by a
selection of those assembled in 1947 reveals a clash of intellectual
cultures. There was unity in opposition of the totalitarianism of Nazi
Germany and Communist Russia, and unity in commitment to personal
freedom. But there was no common underlying philosophy on which could be
built a party of freedom. Whatever hopes Hayek entertained prior to Mont
Pelerin for an organized political force for freedom, his "party of
life" remained largely unrealized. Economic science became the
lingua franca of the MPS. And economic science, no less than biological
science or physical science, is neither friend nor enemy of freedom. It
is merely a tool.
Thanks to Roger Backhouse. Angus Burgin, Sam Gregg. Kevin Jung.
Tiago Mara. Steve Medema, and participants in HISRECO 2008 for comments
on an earlier draft.
(1.) Eucken, professor of economics, University of Freiburg;
Gideonse, president, Brooklyn College; Hazlett, American journalist;
Iverson, professor of economics, University of Copenhagen; Jewkes,
professor of economics, University of Oxford.
(2.) R. M. Hartwell, A History of the Mont Pelerin Society
(Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1995), 42.
(3.) F. A. Hayek, "Opening Address to a Conference at Mont
Pelerin," in Studies in Philosophy. Politics and Economics
(Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1967 [1947]). 149.
(4.) For example, Action Francaise.
(5.) F. A. Hayek, The Road to Serfdom (Chicago, University of
Chicago Press, 1944).
(6.) J. Benda, La Trahison des Clercs (Paris: B. Grasset, 1927).
(7.) J. G. Crowther, The Social Relations of Science (New York,
Macmillan, 1941).
(8.) F. A. Hayek. "Historians and the Future of Europe,"
in Studies in Philosophy, Politics, and Economics (Chicago: University
of Chicago Press, 1967 [19441), 140.
(9.) Mandell Creighton was an Anglican clergyman and bishop. In
1884 he was elected to the newly created Dixie Professorship of
Ecclesiastical History at the University of Cambridge.
(10.) Leoni, Italian legal theorist; Shenfield, British economist
and barrister.
(11.) Hartwell, History, 148. The liberty and religion session that
Leoni and Shenfield proposed did not make the program for Vichy.
Shenfield gave a paper on "Fundamental Constitutional
Problems" in a session on the same topic. Leoni was elected
president at Vichy but was murdered two months afterward by a
disgruntled employee.
(12.) Orton was among the charter members of the MPS upon
incorporation. See Hartwell, Histog, 51.
(13.) W. A. Orton, The Liberal Tradition: A Study of the Social and
Spiritual Conditions of Freedom (New Haven: Yale University Press,
1945).
(14.) Hartwell, History, chap. 6.
(15.) Wilhelm Ropke, A Humane Economy: The Social Framework of the
Free Market (Indianapolis: The Liberty Fund, 1971 [1960]);
[degrees]vitas Humana: A Humane Order of Society, trans. C.S. Fox
(London: William Hodge, 1944); Mass und Mitte (Erlenbach-Zurich:
Rentsch, 1950); The Social Crisis of Our Time, trans. Annette and Peter
S. Jacobsohn (London: William Hodge, 1950); and International Order and
Economic Integration, trans. Gwen E. Trinks, Joyce Taylor, and Ciceley
Kiiufer (Erlenbach-Zurich: Rentsch, 1954).
(16.) On Knight's religious background, see J. M. Buchanan,
"Frank H. Knight: 1885-1972," in Remembering the University of
Chicago: Teachers, Scientists, and Scholars, ed. E. Shils (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1991), and R. Emmett, "The Religion of
a Skeptic: Frank H. Knight on Ethics, Spirituality and Religion During
His Iowa Years," mimeo, 2007.
(17.) F. H. Knight and T. W. Merriam, The Economic Order and
Religion (New York and London: Harper & Brothers, 1945), 59.
(18.) F. H. Knight, "Short Cuts to Justice and
Happiness," Ethics 57 (April 1947): 199-205.
(19.) W. A. Orton, "Letter to F. A. Hayek," Hayck Papers,
1947, Stanford, CA, Hoover Institution.
(20.) F. H. Knight, The Ethics of Competition, and Other Essays
(New York: Harper & Brothers. 1935).
(21.) M. Friedman and G. J. Stigler, Roofs or Ceilings? The Current
Housing Problem (Irvington-on-the-Hudson, NY: Foundation for Economic
Research, 1946).
(22.) Stigler wrote to Friedman in late 1946, "A junket to
Switzerland in April is contemplated, to save liberalism. I assume you
& Aaron would go. If this comes off, (1) train Aaron on bridge, and
(2) let's find a fourth liberal; and teach him." J. D. Hammond
and C. H. Hammond, eds. Making Chicago Price Theory: Friedman-Stigler
Correspondence 1945-1957 (Abington, UK, and New York: Routledge., 2006).
49.
(23.) J. D. Hammond, "Transcendental Commitments of
Economists: Friedman, Knight, and Nef," mimeo, 2007.
(24.) On Friedman's religious background, see Hammond, Making
Chicago Price Theory, and M. Friedman and R. D. Friedman, Two Lucky
People: Memoirs (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998).
(25.) M. Friedman, "The Role of Government in Education,"
in Economics and the Public Interest, ed. R.A. Solo (New Brunswick, NJ:
Rutgers University Press, 1955), 128-29.
(26.) M. Friedman, "Selling Schooling Like Groceries: The
Voucher Idea," New York Times Magazine, September 23, 1975,
www.edchoice.org/The-Friedmans/The-Friedmans-on-School-Choice/Selling-School-like-Groceries--The-Voucher-Idea.aspx.
(27.) Rustow. German sociologist and economist
(28.) F. A. Hayek, "Why I Am Not a Conservative," in The
Constitution of Liberty (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1960),
408.
(29.) Wilhelm Ropke, "Opening Speech at the Turin Meeting of
the Mont Pelerin Society," Mont Pelerin Quarterly 3 (1962): 8
(30.) Ibid., 10.
J. Daniel Hammond and Claire H. Hammond are professors of economics
at Wake Forest University. They edited Making Chicago Price Theory:
Friedman-Stigler Correspondence 1945-1957.