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Congressional Issues 2010
SOCIETY
Magic, Envy, and Economic Underdevelopment
by Gary North |
Since the great depression of the 1930’s, and especially since
1945, the concern of concerns among orthodox Keynesian economic planners
has been economic growth. The wartime planning experiences of many
economists and industrial managers convinced them of the efficacy of
central planning, or at least modified planning in a so-called “mixed”
economy. A very forthright admission in this regard was made in the
mid-1960’s by Barbara Ward, England’s establishment economist.
Principle is out; pragmatism is in: “Thus, not by theory or dogma but
largely by war-induced experience the Western market economies have come
to accept the effectiveness and usefulness of a partnership between
public and private activity . . . but there is now no question of
exclusive reliance on any one instrument or any one method. The
pragmatic market economies have worked out their own evolving
conceptions of public and private responsibility and the result is the
dynamic but surprisingly stable mixed economy of the Western world.”[1]
Almost as she was writing these words—in fact, precisely when she was
writing them—the highly regarded stability of the Western economies
was beginning to shatter on the rock of monetary inflation and its
induced boom-bust cycle. Virtually at the end of the road for successful
Keynesian planning—”successful” being defined as temporarily
stable and publicly (politically) acceptable—a series of such
overconfident books and articles were published. Today, they are jokes.
Even the most Liberal of our political cartoonists have punctured the
economists’ (meaning Keynesians’) balloon.
[2]
Not all economists became enamored by their experiences in wartime
planning. Probably the most prominent English economist who did was
Lionel (Lord) Robbins, who subsequently disinherited his own very fine
book, The Great Depression (Macmillan, 1934). Yet it was not so
much the professional economists whose experience in World War I and
later in World War II led them down the primrose path of central
economic planning. As Hayek has noted, the ones who were really
captivated by the wonders of central planning were the businessmen! This
was especially true of the ones involved in the First World War. “I
think the most remarkable thing was that the most ambitious planners
among them were not the academic people who had gone into planning but
were the business leaders who had been called into a planning activity
and found that in directing a whole industry they were saved so many of
the troubles they had as individual enterprises that they were greatly
attracted by the idea of preserving centralized direction of monopolized
industries.” It was much the same in the Second World War, Hayek
argues, at least among the businessmen. “The noneconomists among them,
I think, have shown very much the same reactions as the planners of
World War I. They were fascinated by the delectable task of running a
big thing, and, if they had views favorable to it beforehand, they had
only become more convinced planners by their experience.”[3]
If anything, Hayek said, the English economists he had known were more
skeptical afterward.
The younger Keynesians, however, had been given their baptism in the
“real” world, and they cried for more. They did not want to see the
reappearance of depression after the war (which most economists had
expected in 1945), and they fervently believed that the “successful”
Keynesian tool kit could solve the problems. It was the philosophy of
stones into bread.[4] Growth
could be planned, directed, and brought into existence by the use of
macroeconomic models. When continuing monetary inflation kept the
post-war depression repressed,
[5] Keynesians took heart. The millennium had come. The tool kit
worked. The Cold War, plus Korea, plus more Cold War equalled [sic]
a politically acceptable excuse for keeping central planning and high
federal budget expenditures. The budget was the central lever; it would
be the device used to keep prosperity running smoothly. Only to
keep the budget from absorbing too much of the consumers’ money, they
had to create new money through the Federal Reserve System, to help
purchase a portion of the federal debt. From $20 billion held by the Fed
as a monetary reserve in 1950 to $27 billion in 1960, to $62 billion in
1970 and to $84 billion in July of 1974, the trend is clear: more
federal debt certificates held by the Federal Reserve System, and more
money created as a result of this debt (which is legally “as good as
gold” for use as a national monetary reserve.)[6]
The consumers received more money to spend, but after 1964, this new
money began to make itself felt in the consumer goods markets. Price
inflation had arrived.
The confidence of the Keynesian planners had been so great that they
had believed that it was the Keynesian tool kit of deficit financing and
central planning that had brought the miracle. They began to believe
that this tool kit could be exported. It would make it possible for
Cambridge- and Harvard-educated leaders from backward (later politely
changed to “underdeveloped”) nations to bring Western prosperity to
their lands. A new economic sub-field was born after 1945: economic
development. Its rationale was clear: the justification of massive
(never sufficient) giveaways by Western central governments of wealth
coercively extracted from their own citizens’ pockets. At some
undefined point, these so-called “transfer payments” would enable
the recipient nations to become productive. Economic growth would then
be the West’s primary export. “Primitive” cultures could then
become “modern.” Stones into bread would be a worldwide phenomenon.
The conception of a “primitive” culture needs explanation.
Whether we choose to call a culture primitive, backward, or merely
underdeveloped, we still have the same basic concept in mind. It is
almost universally assumed that “primitive” means temporally
prior in some kind of development outline. Almost invariably, the
guiding intellectual framework is that of cultural evolution. Today,
the concept may be referred to as developmentalism. Its history
is ancient; it was present long before Darwin brought his researches to
light. If anything, it was the concept of cultural evolution which acted
as an intellectual paradigm for the cosmological evolutionists (e.g.,
Kant) and later the biological evolutionists (e.g., Buffon, Lamarck,
Erasmus Darwin, Spencer, Charles Darwin).[7]
Developmentalism is strictly a Western product, or at least linear
developmentalism is. Classical antiquity held to a cyclical concept
of social change; although unique historical events might have been
emphasized by classical historians, the cyclical pattern of degeneration
and transformation maintained its grip on men’s minds. Man’s history
was one of degeneration: golden age, silver age, bronze age, iron age.
Hesiod’s Works and Days (8th century B.C.) was built around
this conception. Only the promise of some divine world savior -- a
secular, political figure -- offered hope, and this was only the hope
that some discontinuous event or person would hurl men upward, only to
begin a new process of degeneration.
[8] The process was understood to be eternal.
Augustine modified this conception, following the principles of
interpretation set forth by the Hebrew and Christian Scriptures. Human
existence is bound. Men are born, live, and die. There has been an
original creation out of nothing. There will be a final judgment. While
all human institutions are transitory, coming and going endlessly, there
is meaning and structure to history, for it is guided by a sovereign
Creator. The city of man is subject to flux, but the City of God -- the
eternal, spiritual city -- is unchanging. It provides our standards of
achievement and our eternal reward or damnation. This world of the
heavenly city is permanent, unlike the world built by men’s hands.
There is spiritual progress in life, for the kingdom of God has
come; Jesus Christ appeared among men, and His church shall never be
destroyed. Augustine did not believe in earthly developmentalism,
however. His developmentalism was confined to spiritual growth.[9]
He had abandoned the earthly optimism of the fourth-century historian,
Eusebius, who had seen in Constantine’s reign the beginning of an
earthly kingdom of political, as well as spiritual, authority.
[10]
The seventeenth century brought a further modification of Augustine’s
vision of linear spiritual development. A revival of Eusebius’ earthly
optimism within Puritan circles was one half of the modification. The
vision of the Holy Commonwealth captured the minds of two generations,
from about 1600 to 1660. [11]
Simultaneously, Enlightenment secularism revived the old optimism. But
Enlightenment speculation was something entirely different from Puritan
hopes. Rationalism returned to the cosmology of Aristotle and the
ancients (e.g., Physics, VIII), borrowing from them the concept
of uncreated and unending matter. They fused this concept with Augustine’s
linear spiritual developmentalism. Thus was born the secular idea of
progress. As Robert Nisbet has so ably summarized it: “By the late
17th century, Western philosophers, noting that the earth’s frame had
still not been consumed by Augustinian holocaust, took a kind of
politician’s courage in the fact, and declared bravely that the world
was never going to end (Descartes, it seemed, had proved this) and that
mankind was going to become ever more knowledgeable and, who knows,
progressively happy.” [12]
In short, only after the year 1600 did men affirm the possibility of
earthly development in a linear fashion. It was this optimism which made
possible the very concept of economic growth as a long-term phenomenon.
It was historical linearity as a fact and a concept which made
possible the modern world. The roots of this linearity are distinctly
Christian and exclusively Western.
The secular version of progress suffered from the very first from a
fundamental confusion. It is one thing to affirm historical linearity as
a means of intellectual classification. It is something very
different to assume (and assert) that this historical linearity is
somehow self-generated, irreversible, and universal. It was also assumed
that this kind of developmental change is uniformitarian; in the
absence of “regressive” historical or institutional barriers, all
social change is progressively constant, devoid of discontinuous leaps.
To apply this distinctly philosophical set of concepts to historical
change, argues Nisbet, is woefully misleading. To say that one “culture”—itself
an intellectual abstraction by selective observers —necessarily or
automatically produces another culture (in the absence of “unnatural”
or “retarding” barriers, of course), is utterly unproven and
probably unprovable.[13]
The Puritan conception, based on the outline of Deuteronomy 8, was that
godly obedience by the majority of a community will produce, by God’s
grace, economic and spiritual progress. It was never based on some
hypothetical “natural” progression of cultural stages. In fact, the
Puritan conception was almost the opposite: what is most natural—ethical
rebellion and perversity—leads to cultural degeneration. But it
was not the Puritan conception which triumphed in the eighteenth century
and after; it was the Enlightenment’s fusion of Aristotelian
cosmological autonomy and Augustinian progress.
The most famous applications of the “stage theory” were those of
Hegel and Marx. They were sons of the Enlightenment. In our own day, the
most famous book on economic developmentalism has been Walt Rostow’s The
Stages of Economic Growth: A Non-Communist Manifesto (1960), a
widely read book on the campuses in the early 1960’s, prior, of
course, to Rostow’s affiliation with President Johnson’s Vietnam
policies. (He became an academic pariah after 1965, as a direct result
of his colleagues’ loss of faith in the old Progressivism’s
international secular messianism. Rostow, sadly for him, had kept the
faith, but the “old time religion” of New Deal internationalism was
no longer selling in academia.) The negative reaction to Rostow’s
political views after 1965 led to the burial of his book, but the book’s
academic burial had come several years before, in a meeting of economic
historians who had come to discuss the Rostow thesis. The proceedings of
that conference were published in 1963, but almost nobody noticed them.
All of Rostow’s concrete proposals for exported economic growth were
shown to be statistically and even theoretically unfounded, and he
publicly backed down from several of them. Most of the contributing
scholars concluded that there are no statistical or theoretical handles
available to indicate when or exactly how a society “takes off” into
self-sustained (Rostow later modified this to “sustained”) economic
growth. [14] The old faith
in autonomous, irreversible, uniformitarian economic growth had been
examined carefully, and however much the economists liked the idea, it
was shown to be little more than a hope. When concretized in historical
situations, his “stage theory” broke down almost completely. The
universalism of developmentalism (as a process in actual history) faded.
Only the hope remains.
But a major question still confronts the historians and economists:
What factors contribute to economic growth? Why do some societies grow
steadily, seemingly as a result of their own people’s efforts, while
others stagnate, despite foreign aid? The best answers have been offered
by three scholars: an economist (P. T. Bauer), a political scientist
(Edward Banfield), and a sociologist (Helmut Schoeck). Bauer, a
professor at the London School of Economics, has published several
important books on the topic of economic development, but by far his
most comprehensive work is Dissent on Development, published by
Harvard University Press in 1972. The key to economic development in a
society, argues Bauer, is the character of the people. The presence of a
socialist planning apparatus inhibits development, since it pours money
into state-approved projects, bases its decisions on politics rather
than economic returns, and acts as a scapegoat for personal failure (“the
government did this to me”). But far more important is the attitude of
the population:
Examples of significant attitudes, beliefs and modes of conduct
unfavorable to material progress include lack of interest in material
advance, combined with resignation in the face of poverty; lack of
initiative, self-reliance and a sense of personal responsibility for
the economic fortune of oneself and one’s family; high leisure
preference, together with a lassitude often found in tropical
climates; relatively high prestige of passive or contemplative life
compared to active life; the prestige of mysticism and of renunciation
of the world compared to acquisition and achievement; acceptance of
the idea of a preordained, unchanging and unchangeable universe;
emphasis on performance of duties and acceptance of obligations,
rather than on achievement or results, or assertion or even
recognition of personal rights; lack of sustained curiosity,
experimentation and interest in change; belief in the efficacy of
supernatural and occult forces and of their influence over one’s
destiny; insistence on the unity of the organic universe, and on the
need to live with nature rather than conquer it or harness it to man’s
needs, an attitude of which reluctance to take animal life is a
corollary; belief in perpetual reincarnation, which reduces the
significance of effort in the course of the present life; recognized
status of beggary, together with a lack of stigma in the acceptance of
charity; opposition to women’s work outside the household [pp.
78-79].
These attitudes are primarily religious in nature. They are not
easily changed, and money alone, even billions of dollars annually, are
not likely to alter them significantly. A nation dependent on another
nation’s largesse is still caught in the trap of the occult. The
increased wealth is not a product of the recipient nation’s planning,
conscientious men. It therefore will not teach men that wealth stems
from moral action and obedience to basic principles of conduct (Deut.
8). The presence of attitudes such as those described in Bauer’s
summary are the sign of “primitivism.” Primitive external conditions
that persist in a culture through countless generations are a sign of
cultural degeneration — the wrath of God (Deut. 8; 28).
Bauer’s favorite example of a population that has pulled itself up
by its own bootstraps, without foreign aid, natural resources, or a
system of massive central planning, is that little piece of rock south
of China, Hong Kong. Free trade, open entry to occupations, low taxes
(until quite recently), the right of profit, and an attitude favorable
to growth have combined to produce an economic miracle. Even the
Japanese cannot compete with them; American capitalists long ago began
screaming about the “unfair competition” — read: effective
competition — of the inhabitants of this bit of rock. But Africa
stagnates, with its untold mineral wealth, or even declines
economically.
Edward Banfield’s gem of a book, The Unheavenly City (1970),
earned him the wrath of most of the academic profession, as well as the
students at Harvard University. So continuous and bitter was the student
opposition that Banfield finally left “scholarly” Harvard for the
University of Pennsylvania. What was the cause of such an outcry?
Simple: Banfield had concluded that the economic backwardness of the
ghetto is primarily the product of the chosen style of life of the
majority of those who live in the ghetto. Most crucial, argues Banfield,
is their conception of the future: they are present-oriented. They want
immediate gratification. They want excitement—”action”—to
brighten their otherwise dull lives. They want no part of the white
middle class and its world of plodding stability. Present-orientation is
the key to understanding the concept of “lower class,” not present
income. Present income can rise later; it can be supplemented by income
from other family members. But present-orientedness is internal. There
is no imposed solution possible: no school program, with its system of
endless written exams; no job training programs, that in 1967 were
costing $8,000 per enrollee; no system of rehabilitation for hardened
criminals. The problem is spiritual, moral, and cultural. White money
changes only the level of activity in the ghetto, not its general
direction. [15]
Both Bauer and Banfield have struck at the very heart of modern
economic Liberalism. The simple world of environmentalism is a myth,
they have concluded. So many dollars per capita of wealth redistribution
on the part of civil governments mean nothing. The key is internal.
White middle class bureaucrats, armed with their dollars and their
survey forms, do not and cannot change anything. The old routine of “find
a problem, cure a problem” is too simplistic; money and more public
education are insufficient. White middle class bureaucrats have tried to
transform men’s lives and cultures by spending other people’s money.
It has been dollar diplomacy of the grossest kind: the attempt to buy
people’s minds. And it has failed, and failed miserably. The policies
of Liberal reformism have constituted a massive, endless failure. The
operating presupposition of their programs has been external
environmentalism, and that principle is totally false. The problems are
moral not external. The slums are in people’s hearts. Thus, concludes
Nisbet in his lively review of Banfield’s book, the old formula of
Liberal bureaucracy has to be changed, from “Don’t just sit there,
do something!” to “Don’t just do something, sit there!”
[16]
Corroborating evidence has been produced in the field of public
education. James S. Coleman supervised a major study of educational
opportunity in the United States back in the mid-1960’s. One estimate
has placed it as the second most expensive social science research
project in our history. Naturally, the federal government funded it. The
result was a lengthy report: Equality of Educational Opportunity (Government
Printing Office, 1966). The data were startling. School facilities for
black and white children, in any given region of the country, are about
equal within that region, and equal in almost every statistically
measurable respect. Per capita student expenditures are about the same.
So is teacher training. The results have been studied by a number of
scholars, and their collective conclusions have been published.[17]
The primary conclusion of the Coleman Report and those studying its
figures is simple: there is no measurable impact that public schools
have had on eliminating or even modifying comparative achievement among
students. Furthermore, the data indicate that no known change in school
inputs—teacher salaries, more expensive facilities, bigger school
libraries—is likely to have any significant effect on student output.
As the editors have written, “The central fact is that its findings
were seen as threatening to the political coalition that sponsored it.”
[18] Understandably, it was ignored as long as possible.
What factors are important, according to the Coleman Report?
Primarily, family inputs. Innate ability, peer group pressures,
and community standards are also important. In short, there is no sign
that anything short of radical reconstruction of the whole society would
change the learning patterns of students, and there is no guarantee that
even this would do anything but lower all performance to the least
common denominator. Once again, the simplistic environmentalism of
Liberal reformism has been thwarted, this time by its own methods of
investigation. This, of course, has no measurable effect in the calls
for ever higher public school budgets. Now the reformers are convinced
that public education has to start earlier, “before the lowered level
of competence sets in.”[19]
If a century and a half of coercive public education has failed to meet
its promised goals, then there has to be more of it. All facts are
interpreted in terms of the religious presuppositions of the
investigators.
P. T. Bauer mentioned the belief in occultism as one of the cultural
forces of economic retardation. Helmut Schoeck, the sociologist, has
explored this in greater depth. His monumental study, Envy, has
been conveniently ignored by most scholars. The facts he presents,
however, are extremely important. His basic thesis is straightforward:
envy against the wealth or achievements of others reduces the ability of
individuals to advance themselves economically. Envy is not mere
jealousy. It is not wanting the other man’s goods for oneself. It is
the outright resentment against anyone even possessing greater wealth—the
desire to reduce another person’s position even if this reduction in
his wealth in no way improves the position of the envious person.
Nowhere is envy more devastating in its effects than in so-called
primitive cultures.
If a person or his family get ahead of the accepted tribal minimum,
two very dangerous things can easily take place. First, he will be
suspected of being a wizard or a witch (which can be the same thing).
Second, he can become fearful of being the object of the evil magic of
others. As Schoeck writes, “The whole of the literature on the subject
of African sorcery shows the envious man (sorcerer) would like to harm
the victim he envies, but only seldom with any expectation of thereby
obtaining for himself the asset that he envies—whether this be a
possession or a physical quality belonging to the other.”[20]
Understandably, this envy is present only where there is close social
proximity between the envious and the envied. It is always
considered very difficult to bewitch a stranger with any success.[21]
The efficacy of demonic magic is strong in these non-Christian
cultures. The fear of magic is pervasive. Thus, the threat of its use
against the truly successful man causes men with talents to conceal them
from their fellows. Men become secretive about what they own. They
prefer to attribute any personal successes to luck or fate, both
impersonal.
Institutionalized envy . . . or the ubiquitous fear of it,
means that there is little possibility of individual economic
achievement and no contact with the outside world through which the
community might hope to progress. No one dares to show anything that
might lead people to think he was better off. Innovations are
unlikely. Agricultural methods remain traditional and primitive, to
the detriment of the whole village, because every deviation from
previous practice comes up against the limitations of envy.[22]
Furthermore, Schoeck writes: “It is impossible for several families
to pool resources or tools of any kind in a common undertaking. It is
almost equally impossible for any one man to adopt a leading role in the
interests of the village.”[23]
While Schoeck does not discuss it, the problem of institutionalized envy
and magic for the establishment of democratic institutions in primitive
cultures is almost overwhelming. Once a chief’s link to authority is
destroyed, who is to lead? If a man cannot point to his family’s long
tradition or authority or semi-divine status as ruler, who is to say who
should lead? Whoever does proclaim himself as leader had better be
prepared to defend his title from envy and magic. In a culture in which
the authority of traditional rulers has been eroded by Western
secularism and Western theories of individualism and democracy, the
obvious alternative is power.
Perhaps most important as a retarding factor is the effect that envy
has on men’s concept of time. “In a culture incapable of any
form of competition, time means nothing.”[24]
Men do not discuss their plans with each other. Shared goals, except of
a traditional nature, are almost absent in magical societies. “Ubiquitous
envy, fear of it and those who harbour it, cuts off such people from any
kind of communal action directed towards the future. Every man is for
himself, every man is thrown back upon his own resources. All striving,
preparation and planning for the future can be undertaken only by
socially fragmented, secretive beings.”
[25] Is it any wonder, then, that primitive cultures stay primitive,
despite massive doses of foreign aid—state-to-state aid? Schoeck does
not exaggerate when he concludes: “As a system of social control,
Black Magic is of tremendous importance, because it governs all
interpersonal relationships.”
[26]
The concept of general economic growth was not present in the pagan
cultures of antiquity. It was only in Judaism and Christianity that such
a view of life could flourish, precisely because economic growth was
understood personally and culturally: it is the product of outward
response to basic ethical requirements. Magical manipulation of the
environment was rejected officially as an illegitimate form of economic
practice. Prayer to a personal Creator by the humble believer is
legitimate; ritual offerings to polytheistic deities or impersonal
forces were outlawed. It is not ritual accuracy that God requires, but a
humble heart and obedience to ethical laws (Micah 6:6-8). Christianity
and Judaism prohibited envy and jealousy. Men are not to covet their
neighbor’s goods (Ex. 20:17), nor are they to envy the prosperity of
the wicked (Prov. 24:19-20): The whole of the 73rd Psalm is directed
against the sin of envy. It could afford to warn men against fretting
about the temporary prosperity of the wicked; the 72nd Psalm had
promised the external, cultural, and total triumph of God on earth and
in time.
The most comprehensive of all colonial American Puritan treatises was
Rev. Samuel Willard’s Compleat Body of Divinity, the largest
book ever published in Puritan days (1726). It was a compilation of
Willard’s sermons on the Larger Cathechism [sic], which took him
twenty years of Sunday evening services to finish. The section on the
Eighth Commandment, the prohibition of theft, contained a comprehensive
critique on envy. Willard denied that we are hurt by our neighbor’s
advantages. (This fallacy has been called by Mises the Montaigne
dogma, i.e., the belief that in an exchange of goods, one man’s
gain is the other’s loss. It was a basic error of economic
mercantilism, which was a prominent philosophy in Willard’s day. Mises
correctly argues that this doctrine is at the bottom of all modern
theories of class conflict.
[27]) Envy, Willard continued, feeds on grief. It leads to mischief.
It is utterly unreasonable, hate without a cause. It is an affront to
God, for God has set men up for His purposes; envy is an affront to God’s
purposes and glory in this world. Furthermore, it despises God’s
gifts. It leads to covetousness (jealousy, in Schoeck’s use of the
term). Men should not be tempted to take revenge on those who are more
prosperous than they are. [28]
With preaching like this, men found it difficult openly to envy or covet
their neighbor’s prosperity. The fruits of men’s personal labor
could be safely displayed. It would pay men individually to plan for the
future, both individually and in groups. The free market could flourish
because the ethical supports so fundamental for its existence were
provided by Christian preaching and laws against magic.
Magic again is coming back into the thinking of Western men. By
abandoning the belief in a Creator God and a world of personal law,
modern man has been thrown back into the grim polarity of the classical
world: blind impersonal fate vs. blind impersonal chance.[29]
R. C. Zaehner is quite correct in beginning his study, Zen, Drugs and
Mysticism (1972), with an analysis of the philosophy of the
biologist, Jacques Monod (Chance and Necessity). Man is alone in
an infinite world, simultaneously determined and subject to total
randomness. This is all the promise of science holds for man: an
endless, meaningless process of determinism and indeterminism. Men seek
to escape this world by means of mystical illumination (meditation,
drugs, alpha-wave machines) or by means of power from below (magic
and revolution). A world without God is a world without meaning. It is a
world ripe for the Satanic religion of magic.
From an economic point of view, we already have a widespread
philosophy of envy present in industrial societies. If magic is
reintroduced to the West, then cultural degeneration is assured. Modern
society is not some autonomous mechanism. It needs ethical and
philosophical support. We should heed Schoeck’s warning: “The
primitive people’s belief in black magic differs little from modern
ideas. Whereas the socialist believes himself robbed by the employer,
just as the politician in a developing country believes himself robbed
by the industrial countries, so primitive man believes himself robbed by
his neighbor, the latter having succeeded by black magic in spiriting
away to his own fields part of the former’s harvest.”
[30] Modern secularism and socialism threaten us with economic
reversal—the kind of disastrous reversal promised by God in the 28th
chapter of Deuteronomy. Magic and envy, whether secular or animistic,
are equally primitive.
[1] Barbara Ward, Spaceship
Earth (New York: Columbia University Press, 1966), pp. 9-10.
[2] A choice example
is Haynie’s panel of experts, gathered around a table bearing a
sign, “Government Economists”: the Mad Hatter, Snoopy, Mickey
Mouse (in his magician’s hat
from the “Sorcerer’s Apprentice” scene in Fantasia),
and Mad Magazine’s
Alfred E. Newman. The caption reads: “As you know, some of our
policies have been questioned of late.” Newsweek (Sept. 30,
1974), p. 62.
[3] Hayek, in Aaron
Director, ed., Defense, Controls, and Inflation (University of Chicago Press, 1952), p. 303.
[4] The phrase is
Prof. Ludwig von Mises’. See my article, “Economics: Magical or
Creationist,” The Journal of Christian Reconstruction I, 1 (Summer, 1974).
[5] See my article,
“Repressed Depression,” The Freeman (April, 1969); reprinted in my book, An Introduction to Christian
Economics (Nutley, N.J., Craig Press, 1973).
[6] Federal Reserve
Bulletin (August, 1974), p. A 4.
[7] J. W. Burrow, Evolution
and Society (Cambridge: At the University Press, 1970). On philosophical evolutionism, see Greg L. Bahnsen,
“On Worshipping the Creature Rather than the Creator,” The
Journal of Christian Reconstruction I, 1 (Summer, 1974).
[8] Mircea Eliade, Cosmos
and History: The Myth of the Eternal Return (New York: Harper Torchbook, [1954] 1959); Ethelbert Stauffer, Christ
and the Caesars (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1955).
[9] Karl Lowith, Meaning
in History (University of Chicago Press, 1949), p. 172.
[10] It was
Eusebius, argues Theodor Mommsen, who developed a full-fledged idea of progress: “St. Augustine and the Idea of Progress,” Journal of the History of Ideas XII
(1951), 363. Cf. Eusebius’ Ecclesiastical History (Grand
Rapids: Baker Book House, 1955), Bk. X, ch. IV.
[11] Sacvan
Bercovich, “Typology in Puritan New England: The Williams-Cotton
Controversy Reassessed,” American Quarterly XIX (1967),
165-91, esp. 176-83; Iain Murray,
The Puritan Hope (London: Banner of Truth Trust, 1971); J. A.
De Jong, As the Waters
Cover the Sea (Kampen, Netherlands: J. H. Kok, 1970); Aletha
Joy Gilsdorf, “The Puritan Apocalypse: New England Eschatology in
the Seventeenth Century”
(Ph.D dissertation, history, Yale University, 1965), esp. pp. 119-20;
William M. Lament, Godly Rule: Politics and Religion, 1603-60 (London:
Macmillan, 1969).
[12] Robert A.
Nisbet, “The Year 2000 and All That,” Commentary (June,
1968), 61.
[13] Robert Nisbet, Social
Change and History: Aspects of the Western Theory of Development (New
York: Oxford University Press, 1969), ch. 8.
[14] W. W. Rostow,
ed., The Economics of Take-Off into Sustained Growth (New York: St. Martin’s, 1963). His original article had been
titled, “The Take-off into Self-Sustained Growth,” Economic
Journal (March, 1956).
[15] Edward C.
Banfield, The Unheavenly City: The Nature and Future of Our Urban
Crisis (Boston: Little, Brown & Co., 1970). A revised
edition, The Unheavenly City Revisited (1974), answers his critics politely.
[16] Robert A.
Nisbet, “Urban Crisis Revisited.” Intercollegiate Review (Winter,
1970-71), 7. Cf. Christopher De
Muth, “Banfield Returns,” The Alternative (Nov. 1974).
[17] Frederick
Mosteller and Patrick Moynihan, eds., On Equality of Educational Opportunity (New York: Random House, 1972).
[20] Helmut Schoeck,
Envy: A Theory of Social Behavior (New York: Harcourt, Brace
& World, 1969), p. 37.
[27] Ludwig von
Mises, Human Action. 3rd ed. (Chicago: Regnery, 1966), p.
664.
[28] Samuel Willard,
A Compleat Body of Divinity (New York: Johnson Reprints,
[1726] 1969), pp. 750-52.
[29] Charles Norris
Cochrane, Christianity and Classical Culture (New York:
Oxford University Press. [1940]), pp. 156-60.
[30] Schoeck, Envy,
p. 41.
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