



Ludwig Von Mises Institute

Henry Hazlitt

[Day 18 of Robert Wenzel's 30-day reading list that will lead you to become a knowledgeable libertarian, this article appears as chapter 6, "The Road to Totalitarianism," in On Freedom and Free Enterprise: Essays in Honor of Ludwig von Mises (1956).]

In spite of the obvious ultimate objective of the masters of Russia to communize and conquer the world, and in spite of the frightful power which such weapons as guided missiles and atomic and hydrogen bombs may put in their hands, the greatest threat to American liberty today comes from within. It is the threat of a growing and spreading totalitarian ideology.

Totalitarianism in its final form is the doctrine that the government, the state, must exercise total control over the individual. The American College Dictionary, closely following Webster’s Collegiate, defines totalitarianism as “pertaining to a centralized form of government in which those in control grant neither recognition nor tolerance to parties of different opinion.”

Now I should describe this failure to grant tolerance to other parties not as the essence of totalitarianism, but rather as one of its consequences or corollaries. The essence of totalitarianism is that the group in power must exercise total control. Its original purpose (as in communism) may be merely to exercise total control over “the economy.” But “the state” (the imposing name for the clique in power) can exercise total control over the economy only if it exercises complete control over imports and exports, over prices and interest rates and wages, over production and consumption, over buying and selling, over the earning and spending of income, over jobs, over occupations, over workers — over what they do and what they get and where they go — and finally, over what they say and even what they think.

If total control over the economy must in the end mean total control over what people do, say, and think, then it is only spelling out details or pointing out corollaries to say that totalitarianism suppresses freedom of the press, freedom of religion, freedom of assembly, freedom of immigration and emigration, freedom to form or to keep any political party in opposition, and freedom to vote against the government. These suppressions are merely the end-products of totalitarianism.

All that the totalitarians want is total control. This does not necessarily mean that they want total suppression. They suppress merely the ideas which they don’t agree with, or of which they are suspicious, or of which they have never heard before; and they suppress only the actions that they don’t like, or of which they cannot see the necessity. They leave the individual perfectly free to agree with them, and perfectly free to act in any way that serves their purposes — or to which they may happen at the moment to be indifferent. Of course, they sometimes also compel actions, such as positive denunciations of people who are against the government (or who the government says are against the government), or groveling adulation of the leader of the moment. That no individual in Russia today gets the constant groveling adulation that Stalin demanded chiefly means that no successor has yet succeeded in securing Stalin’s unchallenged power.

Once we understand “total” totalitarianism, we are in a better position to understand degrees of totalitarianism. Or rather — since totalitarianism is by definition total — it would probably be more accurate to say that we are in a better position to understand the steps on the road to totalitarianism.

We can either move, from where we are, toward totalitarianism on the one hand or toward freedom on the other. How do we ascertain just where we now are? How do we tell in what direction we have been moving? In this ideological sphere, what does our map look like? What is our compass? What are the landmarks or constellations to guide us?

It is a little difficult, as nebulous and conflicting usage shows, to agree on precisely what liberty means. But it isn’t too difficult to agree on precisely what slavery means. And it isn’t too difficult to recognize the totalitarian mind when we meet one. Its outstanding mark is a contempt for liberty. That is, its outstanding mark is a contempt for the liberty of others. As de Tocqueville remarked in the preface to his “France Before the Revolution of 1789,”

Despots themselves do not deny the excellence of freedom, but they wish to keep it all to themselves, and maintain that all other men are utterly unworthy of it. Thus it is not on the opinion which may be entertained of freedom that this difference subsists, but on the greater or the less esteem that we have for mankind; and it may be said with strict accuracy, that the taste a man may show for absolute government bears an exact ratio to the contempt he may profess for his countrymen.

The denial of freedom rests, in other words, on the assumption that the individual is incapable of managing his own affairs.

Three main tendencies or tenets mark the drift toward totalitarianism. The first and most important, because the other two derive from it, is the pressure for a constant increase in governmental powers, for a constant widening of the governmental sphere of intervention. It is the tendency toward more and more regulation of every sphere of economic life, toward more and more restriction of the liberties of the individual. The tendency toward more and more governmental spending is a part of this trend. It means in effect that the individual is able to spend less and less of the income he earns on the things he himself wants, while the government takes more and more of his income from him to spend it in the ways that it thinks wise. One of the basic assumptions of totalitarianism, in brief (and of such steps toward it as socialism, state paternalism, and Keynesianism), is that the citizen cannot be trusted to spend his own money. As government control becomes wider and wider, individual discretion, the individual’s control of his own affairs in all directions, necessarily becomes narrower and narrower. In sum, liberty is constantly diminished.

One of the great contributions of Ludwig von Mises has been to show through rigorous reasoning, and a hundred examples, how government intervention in the market economy always finally results in a worse situation than would otherwise have existed, even as judged by the original objectives of the advocates of the intervention.

I assume that other contributors to this symposium will explore this phase of interventionism and statism rather fully; and therefore I should like to devote particular attention here to the political consequences and accompaniments of government intervention in the economic sphere.

I have called these political accompaniments consequences, and to a large extent they are; but they are also, in turn, causes. Once the power of the state has been increased by some economic intervention, this increase in state power permits and encourages further interventions, which further increase state power, and so on.

The most powerful brief statement of this interaction with which I am acquainted occurs in a lecture delivered by the eminent Swedish economist, the late Gustav Cassel. This was published in a pamphlet with the descriptive but rather cumbersome title: From Protectionism Through Planned Economy to Dictatorship.[1] I take the liberty of quoting an extensive passage from it:

The leadership of the state in economic affairs which advocates of Planned Economy want to establish is, as we have seen, necessarily connected with a bewildering mass of governmental interferences of a steadily cumulative nature. The arbitrariness, the mistakes and the inevitable contradictions of such policy will, as daily experience shows, only strengthen the demand for a more rational coordination of the different measures and, therefore, for unified leadership. For this reason Planned Economy will always tend to develop into Dictatorship.… The existence of some sort of parliament is no guarantee against planned economy being developed into dictatorship. On the contrary, experience has shown that representative bodies are unable to fulfill all the multitudinous functions connected with economic leadership without becoming more and more involved in the struggle between competing interests, with the consequence of a moral decay ending in party — if not individual — corruption. Examples of such a degrading development are indeed in many countries accumulating at such a speed as must fill every honorable citizen with the gravest apprehensions as to the future of the representative system. But apart from that, this system cannot possibly be preserved, if parliaments are constantly over-worked by having to consider an infinite mass of the most intricate questions relating to private economy. The parliamentary system can be saved only by wise and deliberate restriction of the functions of parliaments.… Economic dictatorship is much more dangerous than people believe. Once authoritative control has been established it will not always be possible to limit it to the economic domain. If we allow economic freedom and self-reliance to be destroyed, the powers standing for Liberty will have lost so much in strength that they will not be able to offer any effective resistance against a progressive extension of such destruction to constitutional and public life generally. And if this resistance is gradually given up — perhaps without people ever realizing what is actually going on — such fundamental values as personal liberty, freedom of thought and speech and independence of science are exposed to imminent danger. What stands to be lost is nothing less than the whole of that civilization that we have inherited from generations which once fought hard to lay its foundations and even gave their life for it.

Cassel has here pointed out very clearly some of the reasons why economic interventionism and government economic planning lead toward dictatorship. Let us now, however, looking at another aspect of the problem, see whether or not we can identify, in an unmistakable way, some of the main landmarks or guideposts that can tell us whether we are moving away from or nearer to totalitarianism.

I said a while back that three main tendencies mark the drift toward totalitarianism, and that the first and most important, because the other two derive from it, is the pressure for a constant increase in governmental intervention, in governmental spending, and in governmental power. Let us now consider the other two tendencies.

continue at Ludwig von Mises Institute:

http://mises.org/daily/5705/The-Road-to-Totalitarianism