This is Part Two of a series (I, II) on the origination of fascism and communism within liberalism. Last week we considered the nature of philosophical-intellectual lineages, introduced the two liberalisms, and defined fascism and communism. We pick up this week with a discussion of the first and easier to explicate part, totalitarianism’s origin in French liberalism.

Now the relationship of the French liberal tradition and of Utilitarianism to the totalitarian twins is not at all hard to trace. Totalitarianism is a means to maximize what each system desires, to harmonize internal contradictions. In French liberalism, the core desire is autonomy, based in part on a belief in the perfection and perfectibility of man (a belief English liberalism either shares or will come to share all too soon). The problem of autonomy is that my autonomy (I do not say ‘freedom’ because this is not Biblical freedom¹) impinges on your autonomy and yours upon mine. If I desire to use your wallet to pay for my meal, your desire for me not to steal from you prevents me from having perfect autonomy, perfect (in the thought of the French enlightenment) freedom.

Now to this Rousseau had a very clever solution, one truly ingenious. If the problem of clashing wills is that they clash, and because a clash requires two parties at least, the solution is to reduce all wills to a unity. If all men desire the same thing, if all men have literally the same will (have wills only as a component of that same will), then autonomy will be preserved, at least against the power of man. Further, when it is pressed against this position that men do demonstrably have differing, disparate wills, Rousseau had an answer: the will which matters is not the expressed will. The will which matters is the rational will, the will which desires what is ought to want. This will is, in fact, component to the General Will, and the General Will, because it is the will of all, cannot infringe on autonomy. Of course, because it is the sum of all wills,² it has also total power over all objects of will, of human life.

Totalitarianism, therefore, where the state manifests the General Will, whether through democratic pretext (early Nazi Germany) or assertion of inherent correctness-rationality (Communist China, I believe, but any autocratic modern totalitarian state), is the natural outworking of Rousseauian Liberalism. It provides for the complete freedom of all by uniting all their real desires and acting upon that unity as a body, with purportedly maximal efficiency. That all men are coerced into this is irrelevant, for their true desire, their true will, is the will of the state. If this doesn’t sound familiar to you, consider how modern leftism uses the word ‘democracy’ to mean ‘what the left and its institutions desire’. This solution is brilliant; it is depraved. But how can a solution be anything less than depraved when the question asked, how to maximize man’s autonomy, is the question which summarizes the essential nature of sin, to rebel against God.

As for Utilitarianism, the path is similar. Utilitarianism posits that the ‘right’ thing to do is whatever maximizes ‘utility’; by ‘utility’ is meant pleasure, lack of pain, or some combination of the two, the details of the definition depending on the particular utilitarian (as with the details of how the measurement of utility is accomplished). Utilitarianism reduces morality thus to a technical question, one of skill and technique. What system produces the most happiness? It can be and has been argued that totalitarianism is a terrible system for minimizing pain or maximizing happiness, but the hubris of man is great. If he can engineer a rocket ship, why not a society? That thought is integral to utilitarianism as a social movement- that man can formulate the best system without reference to God’s authority. With the right arrangement, we think, we could maximize happiness; for that goal, we need power; thus, totalitarianism becomes desirable as concentrating that power into a usable form. To maximize man’s happiness, we make him utterly subservient to the state. You can argue against it, but many have followed this trail; the intellectual lineage is understandable and even natural, whether or not it’s inevitable.³

In contrast to this, the origin of fascism and communism in English liberalism, often called ‘classical liberalism’, is not so clear. English liberalism, after all, has a heritage of preserving individual property, individual rights, and individual free enterprise; it is the stepfather of capitalism (and the father of many of its less-than-inspiring elements⁴). It has, admittedly, a history of slowly forgetting the evil of mankind, the broken nature of mankind, a history of succumbing to the influence and assumptions of French liberalism and its relatives. More fundamentally, English liberalism abandoned God; it started in Berkeley with arguments whose consequences within a few permutations could become heresy, in Locke, Berkeley’s predecessor and the more influential political theorist by far, with unorthodox, even heretical ‘Christianity.’

This departure from God, of course, is the root similarity between fascism, communism, French liberalism, English liberalism, Neoplatonism, Vatican II, and any other un-Godly thing you name. I could present it as an element of the intellectual lineage between English liberalism and totalitarianism, but that would be of little use, despite its truth. It is absolutely accurate that English liberalism helped wean man away from God, to the harm of his eternal soul, and that this weaning-off was important to the rise of totalitarianism in the 19^th, 20^th, and 21^st centuries. It does not, however, show a specific, unique connection between totalitarianism and English liberalism, such as seems necessary to find if we are to understand the constant collapse of the liberal order into fascism⁵ or communism.

A part is semantic and philosophical melding between English and French liberalism. They were, after all, aware of each other, even in the sort of dialogue philosophy engages in, sparring with and contradicting each other, giving different answers to the same questions and different answers to different questions. Further, they had an aesthetic similarity in a focus on freedom- even if English liberalism generally considered it a matter of being let alone, French liberalism as one of being empowered to act. Yet even this does not fully satisfy me. That English liberalism was weak to an infected by French liberalism is a part of the explanation, but it has not been to my mind the whole. Nor, though it is certainly a factor, is the ‘On the Contrary’ development, wherein English Liberalism’s failure to provide utopia (which men want, desiring heaven’s benefit without it’s duties, regardless of what is promised to them) and the influence of the French Liberalism on their desires led to a discontentment fertile to totalitarianism. This problem has been, in fact, the greatest point of disquiet regarding Goldberg’s book since I completed it.

I think I have found another significant part of it, thanks to G.K. Chesterton. Chesterton, a man often underestimated as a political thinker in favor of his cultural contributions, wrote an essay titled ‘How Not To Do It’⁶ which begins as follows: “There are two recognized ways of arguing with a Communist; and they are both wrong.” The point I bring to your attention is the way he proposes as correct:

/QUOTE/ “Now the true, full and final argument against Communism is that private property is much more important than private enterprise. A pickpocket represents private enterprise, but we should hardly say that he supports private property. Private property is not a bribe that exists for the sake of private enterprise. On the contrary, private enterprise is only a tool or weapon, that may sometimes be useful to preserve private property. And it is necessary to preserve private property; simply because the other name of it is liberty.” /QUOTE/

This may seem perfect nonsense. To contrast private enterprise and private property seems insane. Yet consider what we saw in French Liberalism. Autonomy is private enterprise; more particularly, it is private enterprise without limit. As we have seen, the totalitarian model is a natural and indeed brilliant method of maximizing autonomy. Thus, totalitarianism can be seen as a result of maximally preferring private enterprise, to the exclusion of all else. This super-emphasis can be seen too in the French idea of liberty as positive, wherein liberty is conceived as requiring the maximal empowerment of all persons to at least equity of ability-to-act, of autonomy, to the maximization of private enterprise.

Chesterton is right to state that communism is based on a maximization of private enterprise at the expense of private property, private property being that which is sacrificed to the totalitarian state, to the state providing positive liberty. Property is sacrificed to it in two ways: first, that the state assumes practical (fascism) or explicit (communism) control over all property; second, that in both systems man is made the property of the state, its slave. So he has, in theory, a maximal amount of private enterprise, of ability to act- but at the cost of all private property.

 How does this relate to English liberalism?

Locke’s theory of private property gives us our indication. Locke posits that property is produced when labor is combined with material. The labor gives the laborer a property right over that which he labors upon and with, his tools and his fruit. This is the foundation, to Locke, of all property, private and public.

This theory makes private enterprise the basis of private property and therefore superior to it. Further, because private enterprise is the actual virtue of property rights, and particularly in light of the lapsing of property which Locke espoused (after sufficient dereliction of labor), we must conclude that in actual fact property rights are merely a manifestation of private enterprise rights. A man has a right not to anything he owns but to the labor invested in them; the basis of his right to what he ’owns’ is not ownership of the thing itself but his ownership of the labor, which is unfortunately currently inextricable from the thing labored with or upon.

So Lockean liberalism, which sets the standard for English liberalism and prompted many similar theories of property throughout English liberalism, is another and a significant point of relationship between totalitarianism and English liberalism. There is, we see, a basic assumption in English liberalism, the superiority of enterprise to property, which forms a core part of the delusion of totalitarianism, whether communist or fascist. Private enterprise can be maximized, the fascist and the communist says, and he simply asks that we surrender private property- which the classical liberal, all too often, finds he must do, if he would remain consistent to his own philosophy. It is by the grace of God that many are not so consistent; it is by the grace of God that many are more Christian than liberal.

God bless.

(Header pictures based on images sourced from Wikimedia Commons)

Footnotes

1. One of the traps of Arminian soteriology is a tendency to believe that autonomy is synonymous with freedom, despite Christ’s words in Matthew 11:29-30 (“Take My yoke upon you, and learn from Me, for I am gentle and lowly in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For My yoke is easy, and My burden is light”). ↩︎
2. Rousseau thought of a General Will of a nation, rather than of the whole world. The chain of argument he pursues, however, implies the universality of the General Will, at least to all persons in contact with any participant in the Will. To keep the Will within a nation’s borders merely causes the problem of infringed autonomy to reiterate on an international level, after all. ↩︎
3. Give enough time and enough opportunity and a sin will appear; it is the nature of man to sin. So if a philosophy has an off-ramp to sin, some men at least will take it. If that philosophy leads to a place desirable for other reasons, whether as an answer to another philosophy or to justify sin (which men lust for), it will probably become quiet popular in time. This does not, of course, make Utilitarianism necessarily false, any more than the possibility of heresy makes Scripture false; as with the two liberalisms it is a component of (rising in the English context but amenable to parts of the French tradition), it fails on its own merits. ↩︎
4. Capitalism is an imperfect and corrupted system, particularly as applied. Pure free market society is, frankly, immoral, when that free market has extended to things like sex and relationship. I am nevertheless no enemy of free enterprise, being indeed in favor of it as an important element of society. ↩︎
5. Fascism, remember, is aesthetically conservative totalitarianism, whereas communism desires immediate full destruction, leading into a new order, with that new order being typically totalitarian, particularly post-Lenin. ↩︎
6. Found in Essays by Chesterton. I’m using this collection of Chesterton’s work. ↩︎