When Powerful Rhetoric Supports Stupid Arguments: Acton and Macaulay
April 25, 2011
Thomas Macaulay was England's most famous historian in Charles Darwin's day. He had a masterful command of the English language, just as Churchill did two generations later. He was a master stylist, just as Churchill was. And he got important things terribly wrong, just as Churchill did. They were both masters of rhetoric, and they often wrote or said Really Silly Things.
Macauley was no match for Lord Acton as an historian. But he was no match for Acton's use of misleading rhetoric, either. The single most egregious piece of nonsensical rhetoric in libertarian/conservative history is Acton's.
Both Acton and Macaulay are famous for a pair of letters they wrote. Acton's most famous line was in an 1887 letter: "Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely." This statement, by itself, is utter nonsense. It is worse than nonsense; it is satanic. But defenders of limited civil government love to quote it.
"Absolute power corrupts absolutely." First, consider theology. The statement is preposterous. God possesses absolute power. Only God possesses this. Satan would like to possess it, but it is withheld from him. It is withheld from all creatures. To speak of absolute power in any context except God is preposterous. So, Acton used a throw-away line that he could not possibly have defended intellectually or theologically. Yet it got picked up because it sounds so clever.
Second, consider economics. The essence of Austrian school economics is this: economic centralization blinds central planners and bankrupts socialist commonwealths. It leads to serfdom, then collapse. Built into the creation is a short-circuit system against centralized power. Ludwig von Mises made this clear in his 1920 essay, "Economic Calculation in the Socialist Commonwealth." So, absolute power is economically unobtainable. The feedback to power is at first positive, then negative. It is like the curve that results when you add a complementary factor of production: an increase, then a decrease. Power faces the law of diminishing returns. The more centralized the planning system, the fewer resources the planners command. Think "North Korea." The photo does not lie.
Bad rhetoric misleads people. Principled people should guard their language.
When it comes to indulging in bad rhetoric, Macaulay was far worse than Acton, but not so influential. He wrote a letter to an American in 1857. It was published by a Southern newspaper, The Southern Literary Messenger (March 24, 1860). I will go through it (bold print). See how accurate he was.
HOLLY LODGE, KENSINGTON, LONDON, May 23, 1857.
HENRY S. RANDALL, ESQ. -- Dear Sir: You are surprised to learn that I have not a high opinion of Mr. JEFFERSON, and I am surprised at your surprise. I am certain that I never wrote a line, and that I never, in Parliament, in conversation, or even on the hustings -- a place where it is the fashion to court the populace -- uttered a word indicating an opinion that the supreme authority in a State ought to be intrusted to the majority of citizens told by the head; in other words, to the poorest and most ignorant part of society. I have long been convinced that institutions purely democratic must, sooner or later, destroy liberty, or civilization, or both.
The basis of democracy is simple: those who are legally bound to a system of civil laws should be able to determine the content of these laws. To say otherwise is to say that "our betters" should tell us what to say and do. The problem is not democracy; the problem is sin. Each political system concentrates the power of coercion in the state. Then there is a political war to get control over the levers of coercion. There are always representatives in every civil government. The question is this: Whom will they represent? The other question is: How can their victims gain a veto over the worst of laws? There is no such thing as absolute power. There are always ways to beat the system, just as there always ways to game it.
In Europe, where the population is dense, the effect of such institutions would be almost instantaneous. What happened lately in France is an example. In 1848 a pure Democracy was established there.
Nonsense. There is no such thing as pure anything in politics. It is always a mixture of systems.
During a short time there was reason to expect a general spoliation, a national bankruptcy, a new partition of the soil, a maximum of prices, a ruinous load of taxation laid on the rich for the purpose of supporting the poor in idleness.
Nonsense. The French Parliament included Frederic Bastiat. There is never total anything in politics: despotism or liberty.
Such a system would, in twenty years, have made France as poor and barbarous as France of the Carlovingians.
Nonsense. This is rhetoric, and not very clever rhetoric. It was stupid rhetoric. No nation in the West in peacetime has ever reversed economic growth for more than a few years. This has been the case since 1800. The power of liberty -- the free market -- was two generations old in 1857. The greatest social transformation since Noah's Flood was in full swing in 1857, yet Macaulay could not see it. He was as blind as Karl Marx, who was nearsighted to a fault.
Happily the danger was averted; and now there is a despotism, a silent tribune, an enslaved Press. Liberty is gone; but civilization has been saved. I have not the smallest doubt that, if we had a purely Democratic Government here, the effect would be the same. Either the poor would plunder the rich, and civilization would perish; or order and property would be saved by a strong military government, and Liberty would perish.
Here he contrasts liberty and civilization. What a fool! They work together. As liberty increases, civilization expands. Contracts spread. Wealth increases. The range of choices increases. To see liberty and civilization as alternatives has social reality backwards.
You may think that your country enjoys an exemption from these evils. I will frankly own to you that I am of a very different opinion. Your fate I believe to be certain, though it is deferred by a physical cause. As long as you have a boundless extent of fertile and unoccupied land, your laboring population will be far more at ease than the laboring population of the old world; and, while that is the case, the Jeffersonian policy may continue to exist without causing any fatal calamity.
The man was an economic illiterate. To see liberty as a function of cheap land is the same old nonsense that critics of the free market have shoved down our throats for well over a century. "America has metals and good soil and coal. That is what makes Americans rich." They refuse to discuss Hong Kong. This nonsense has an ancient lineage. Macaulay was hoodwinked by it.
But the time will come when New-England will be as thickly peopled as Old England. Wages will be as low, and will fluctuate as much with you as with us.
Oh, great: the iron law of wages. Human action means nothing. Innovation means nothing. Wages were rising in 1857 and continued to rise. He was trapped by Ricardo.
You will have your Manchesters and Birminghams; and, in those Manchesters and Birminghams, hundreds of thousands of artisans will assuredly be sometimes out of work. Then your institutions will be fairly brought to the test.
The free market produces unemployment, he is saying. This is Marxism. It is nonsense.
Distress everywhere makes the laborer mutinous and discontented, and inclines him to listen with eagerness to agitators who tell him that it is a monstrous iniquity that one man should have a million while another cannot get a full meal. In bad years there is plenty of grumbling here, and sometimes a little rioting. But it matters little. For here the sufferers are not the rulers. The supreme power is in the hands of a class, numerous indeed, but select, of an educated class, of a class which is, and knows itself to be, deeply interested in the security of property and the maintenance of order. Accordingly, the malcontents are firmly, yet gently, restrained.
In other words, the workers are constrained by "their betters" -- Macaulay's class peers. The good guys have control over the distribution of badges and guns. Civilization will expand!
The bad time is got over without robbing the wealthy to relieve the indigent. The springs of national prosperity soon begin to flow again; work is plentiful; wages rise, and all is tranquillity and cheerfulness. I have seen England pass three or four times through such critical seasons as I have described.
In short, politics rather than the free market brought back the good times. The free market is weak. It could only be sustained by reliable people like Macaulay and his Oxbridge peers
Through such seasons the United States will have to pass, in the course of the next century, if not of this. How will you pass through them? I heartily wish you a good deliverance. But my reason and my wishes are at war, and I cannot help foreboding the worst. It is quite plain that your Government will never be able to restrain a distressed and discontented majority. For with you the majority is the Government, and has the rich, who are always a minority, absolutely at its mercy. The day will come when, in the State of New-York, a multitude of people, none of whom has had more than half a breakfast, or expects to have more than half a dinner, will choose a Legislature. Is it possible to doubt what sort of Legislature will be chosen? On one side is a statesman preaching patience, respect for vested rights, strict observance of public faith.
Strict observance of public faith? Give me a break!
On the other is a demagogue ranting about the tyranny of capitalists and usurers, and asking why anybody should be permitted to drink champagne and to ride in a carriage, while thousands of honest folks are in want of necessaries.
Capitalists and usurers: the horror! This is Marxism for Tories. Macaulay was an economic ignoramus.
Which of the two candidates is likely to be preferred by a working man who hears his children cry for more bread?
Workers have had the vote since the 1870s. Who won? Crony capitalists. Insiders. Rich men who have gamed the system. In any case, only about 10% of the American labor force today is made up of industrial workers. They are very well paid. .
I seriously apprehend that you will, in some such season of adversity as I have described, do things which will prevent prosperity from returning; that you will act like people would, in a year of scarcity, devour all the seed-corn, and thus make the next year, a year not of scarcity, but of absolute famine.
There has not been famine in the West since the Irish potato famine of the 1840s. He should have seen what was coming: a world without famine, at least outside of Marxist tyrannies. He did not see Marxism coming. Yet he did see the modern economy coming. In 1830, he had made what turned out to be an amazingly accurate prediction of what life in England would be like in 1930. In sharp contrast, his 1857 predictions for the United States never came true, despite both the Constitution and a broad and growing franchise. He thought that a growing economy depended on a political order that rested on a highly restricted franchise. It didn't -- not in England and not in the United States.
There will be, I fear, spoliation. The spoliation will increase the distress. The distress will produce fresh spoliation. There is nothing to stay you. Your Constitution is all sail and no anchor. As I said before, when a society has entered on this downward progress, either civilization or liberty must perish. Either some Caesar or Napoleon will seize the reins of government with a strong hand; or your Republic will be as fearfully plundered and laid waste by barbarians in the twentieth century as the Roman Empire was in the fifth; with this difference, that the Huns and Vandals, who ravaged the Roman Empire, came from without, and that your Huns and Vandals will have been engendered within your country by your own institutions.
Nothing like this has happened. Only once, during World War II, did Federal revenues exceed 20% of GDP, and even then the top was 25%. To this is added state and local taxation: around 40%. This is bad, but the Vandals are not at the gates. Mexicans are trying to get in, not to vandalize, but to get a piece of the action. They want jobs, not social revolution.
(Thinking thus, of course, I cannot reckon JEFFERSON among the benefactors of mankind. I readily admit that his intentions were good and his abilities considerable. Odious stories have been circulated about his private life: but I do not know on what evidence those stories rest; and I think it probable that they are false, or monstrously exaggerated. I have no doubt that I shall derive both pleasure and information from your account of him.
The problem was Hamilton, not Jefferson. We live under Hamilton's curse. Hamilton shared Macaulay's view of democracy.
Rhetoric is powerful. Sometimes it overwhelms common sense, careful scholarship, and obvious error.
It is time to stop quoting bad rhetoric.