If you apply this experience of the last three centuries of history to the present state of human intellection, you will readily be convinced that the annihilation of press freedom, that is to say, of intellectual progress, would have results today even more fatal than those we have recounted. The monarchies whose progressive withering and retrograde movement we have described, deprived of the free use of printing from its inception, felt this deprivation only in a dull, slow, imperceptible way. A people deprived of freedom of the press after having enjoyed it, would experience the initial pain of this loss more sharply, followed by a more rapid degradation. The thing which debases men is not lacking a right but having to give it up. Condillac says there are two sorts of barbarism, the one which goes before enlightened centuries and the one which succeeds them. In the same way one can say there are two kinds of servitude, the one preceding liberty and the one replacing it. The first is a desirable state of affairs compared to the second. But the choice of these is not left to governments, because they cannot annihilate the past.
Imagine an enlightened nation, enriched by the works of a number of studious generations, possessing masterpieces of all types, having made immense scientific and artistic progress, and having got to this point by the only way that can lead there, the enjoyment, assured or precarious, of freedom of publication. If the government of that nation put such constraints on that freedom that it became every day harder to elude them, if it did not allow the exercise of thought except in a predetermined direction, the nation could survive for a while on its former capital, so to speak, on its acquired intelligence, on habits of thinking and doing picked up earlier; but nothing in the world of thought would renew itself. The reproductive principle would have dried up. For some years vanity might stand in for the love of learning. Sophists, remembering what glamour and esteem literary works used once to bestow, would give themselves over to works of ostensibly the same genre. Their writings would combat any good effects which other writings might have had, and as long as there remained any trace of liberal principles, there would be in such a people’s literature some kind of movement, a sort of struggle against these ideas and principles. This very movement, however, this struggle, would be an inheritance of a now-destroyed liberty. To the extent that the last vestiges, the last traditions, could be dispelled, there would be less acclaim and less advantage in continuing these more and more superfluous attacks. When all had been dispelled, the battle would finish, because the combatants would no longer perceive even the shadow of their foes. Conquerors and conquered would alike keep silence. Who knows if the government might not reckon it worth imposing this? It would not want anyone to reawaken extinguished memories, or stir up abandoned ideas. It would come down hard on overzealous acolytes as it used to on its enemies. It would forbid even writings taking its own line, on the interests of humanity, as some pious government once forbade talk of God, for good or ill. Thus a career in real thinking would be definitively closed to the human spirit. The educated generation would gradually disappear. The next generation, seeing no advantage in intellectual occupations, or indeed dangers therein, would break off from them for good. You will say, in vain, that the human spirit could still occupy itself with lighter literature, that it could enter the service of the exact or natural sciences, or devote itself to the arts. When nature created man, she did not consult government. Her design was that all our faculties should be in intimate liaison and that none should be subject to limitation without the others feeling the effect. Independent thinking is as vital, even to lighter literature, science, and the arts, as air is to physical life. One could as well make men work under a pneumatic pump, saying that they do not have to breathe, but must move their arms and legs, as hold intellectual activity to a given object, preventing it from preoccupying itself with important subjects which give it its energy because they remind it of its dignity. Writers strangled in this way start off with panegyrics; but they become bit by bit incapable even of praise and literature finishes up losing itself in anagrams and acrostics. Scholars are no more than the trustees of ancient discoveries which deteriorate and degrade in manacled hands. The source of talent dries up among artists along with the hope of glory which is sustained only by freedom. By a mysterious but incontestable relationship between things from which one thought oneself capable of isolating oneself, they no longer have the ability to represent the human figure nobly when the human spirit is degraded.
Nor would this be the end of the story. Soon commerce, the professions, and the most vital crafts would feel the effects of the death of thought. It should not be thought that commerce on its own is a sufficient motive for activity. People often exaggerate the influence of personal interest. Personal interest itself needs the existence of public opinion in order to act. The man whose opinion languishes, stifled, is not for long excited even by his interests. A sort of stupor seizes him; and just as paralysis extends itself from one part of the body to another, so it extends itself from one faculty to another.--Benjamin Constant (1810?) Principles of Politics Applicable to Government, translated by Dennis O'Keefe., Book VII (On Freedom of Thought), Chapter 5
Recall (here) that at a high level of generality, a road to serfdom thesis holds that an outcome unintended to political decisionmakers is foreseeable to the right kind of observer and that in addition the outcome leads to a loss of political and economic freedom over the medium term. I use ‘medium’ here because the consequences tend to follow in a time-frame within an ordinary human life, but generally longer than one or two years (which is the short-run), and shorter than the centuries’ long process covered by (say) the rise and fall of civilization. Crucially for a road to serfdom thesis, along the way, in order to ward off some unintended and undesirable consequences, decisions are taken that tend to lock in a worse than intended and de facto bad political unintended outcome (lack of freedom or, as Constant emphasizes, loss of rights). It's worth noting that a foreseeable, unintended outcome that is taken to be good is not a road to serfdom thesis. So the fall of feudalism due to luxury spending as diagnosed by Hume and Smith, is not, in their hands, a road to serfdom thesis (even if a social hierarchy leaning theorist of feudalism could present it as such).
The previous paragraph provides a schema for understanding when we're dealing with a road to serfdom thesis. In his (1944) The Road to Serfdom Hayek credits Belloc's (1912) The Servile State with articulating a road to serfdom thesis recall (here and here), although Hayek (and Wikipedia) suggest that the title was inspired by Tocqueville. For (recall) in Book 4, chapter 1, of Democracy in America, Tocqueville claims that the principle of equality generates a 'road to servitude.' But while the phrase seems to have inspired Hayek, and Tocqueville's account fits the schema nicely, it would be a mistake to treat Tocqueville's version of the road to serfdom as providing the template for Belloc and Hayek (and Mises). For Tocqueville is not diagnosing the effects of a welfare state socialism, central planning, or state capitalism. Instead I suggested that Chapter IV ("Laissez Faire") of Hobhouse's (1911) is the progenitor of Belloc's and Hayek's competing road to serfdoms. (I call them competing because they have different normative ideals.)
My schema points to an important feature of road to serfdom theses. They imply that political agents or society could and should have known better than embarking on the fatal action. As Constant implies, while drawing on Condillac, what makes a road to serfdom thesis so shocking is that barbarism can follow from enlightened times not through external conquest but through internal actions. There is, of course, an interesting question lurking in the vicinity here -- one that is highly salient in an age of of scientifically diagnosed man-made climate crisis -- how an age that makes colossal political mistakes can really be called enlightened.
As should be clear by now I think Constant diagnoses a road to serfdom thesis in his account of how restrictions on freedom of publication lead to ruin. The writings of Constant were well known to Tocqueville, Hayek and Röpke (who claimed some priority for a road to serfdom thesis), so there can well be a direct influence.
But I want to close with a quite different set of observations. Since Mill we are trained to understand freedom of speech as an engine of discovery that puts us on the road to truth maybe even make it inevitable we reach it (recall Carl Schmitt and Kalven). Constant, by partial contrast, emphasizes that it is a "reproductive principle." It helps society reproduce itself by being truth preserving <insert your own joke about logical proof just being freedom of speech here!>. I think this is in many ways a more plausible thesis than the engine of discovery one.
Be that as it may, in his analysis, Constant isn't merely thinking of factual preservation of truth as a collection of statements. He is also interested in the spirit of truth. I used 'partial' in the previous paragraph, because Constant does think that freedom of speech is conducive to discovery, but more as a kind of background, enabling condition than the engine itself: "Independent thinking is as vital, even to lighter literature, science, and the arts, as air is to physical life....You will say, in vain, that the human spirit could still occupy itself with lighter literature, that it could enter the service of the exact or natural sciences, or devote itself to the arts." (There is more than a touch of Hume in these lines [go re-read "Of Commerce," and Montesquieu, of course].)
There is, thus, lurking in Constant, as in Hume, and later the historicists, a kind of substantial unity of culture thesis in organicist terms in which freedom of publication is one of the animating principles of that culture (even if due to freedom of speech that culture appears pluralistic even chaotic). It is worth asking to what degree such unity of culture is really true. Even quite tyrannical cultures have had produced eminence in science, after all.
Above, I mentioned Hume, but I could equally have mentioned Spinoza. And, in fact, we get more than a hint that we should be thinking of Spinozism here. While it is completely unnecessary for his argument, Constant adds the sentence, "When nature created man, she did not consult government." This is about as Spinozist one can get. (Constant explicitly mentions Spinoza in a footnote near the end of the book.) Yes, the next sentence discusses nature's purposes, but the purpose is to be an integrated organism that preserves itself! The nod to Spinoza makes sense here because in this chapter, Constant's argument for freedom of speech in terms of the "reproductive principle" is thoroughly pragmatic and conducive to preserve and help flourish the social status quo. The argument is, thus, as it is in Spinoza, an appeal to the enlightened self-interests of the rulers.
I went down a bit of a rabbit hole with this, but I didn’t know that Hayek was explicitly influenced by Belloc’s _Servile State_! Very cool.
Posted by: Alexander Douglas | 09/01/2022 at 04:51 PM