A History Of Government Failure

A History of the Modern World:  From 1917 to the 1980s
by Paul Johnson
(Weidenfeld and Nicolson, London, 1983, pp 817) paperback.

Until his break with the Left in the early 1970s, Paul Johnson was editor of the British left-wing periodical, The New Statesman.  Now he contributes regularly to the London Spectator through his column on the press, and has written numerous volumes, including a history of Christianity and a study of modern nihilism, The Enemy Within.  The extent of his erudition, as well as his commitment to a view of history in which state intervention is not cast in the heroic role, is evident in his latest and largest book, A History of the Modern World.

Johnson's history is global drama on a grand scale, tremendously readable and well-researched.  He offers a mass of interesting information.  He often lets major characters speak for themselves, by skillful use of direct quotes.  This revealing technique brings authenticity and freshness to the narrative.

The book deals with every part of the world, and many areas of human achievement.  Johnson makes full-blooded judgments of people and events.  He demonstrates starkly the irresponsibility of yielding to adventurers and misguided do-gooders.  He offers a lesson in the importance of good management in human affairs.  His analysis seems essentially right-headed.

Two government plagues, says Johnson, have blighted man from the twenties to the eighties:  market meddling and social engineering.  In developing these twin themes, Johnson persuasively overturns conventionally accepted assessments that blame capitalism and the market for most twentieth century tragedies.  The zest he brings to the demolition of such misinterpretations is fuelled by his belief that the modern world is dangerously susceptible to well-packaged mythology.

A good example is the great depression.  Conventional wisdom says it was caused by unrestrained capitalism, and cured by Keynesian interventionism under Roosevelt.  Not so, says Johnson.  He argues that the depression was both caused and prolonged by market meddling.

He contends that the major causes were high US tariffs through the 1920s and beyond, combined with policies of continuous credit-inflation and artificially low interest rates.  He also contends that when the depression hit, the interventionist solution was tried not only by Roosevelt, but also by Hoover immediately before him.  Hoover "sought to use government cash to reflate the economy" (244), and "Roosevelt's legislation for the most part extended or tinkered with Hoover policies" (255).

Johnson wryly comments:  "If interventionism worked, it took nine years and a world war to demonstrate the fact" (257).  By contrast, the German economy recovered much more quickly, Hitler having the sense not to try to run the economy (293).  Johnson's overall assessment of interventionist policies is that "political activities rarely promoted economic well-being, though they might, if intense and protracted enough, undermine it.  The most useful function of government was to hold the ring, within which individuals could advance their own interests, benefiting the communal one in the process" (612).

In fact, however, misguided meddling went on repeatedly and disastrously in most countries from the 1920s to the end of the 1970s.  Johnson is encouraged that by then, "most governments were seeking to reduce the public, and expand the market, sectors of their economies" (728).

Johnson shows how some nations have resisted world trends, and lifted themselves out of the ruck.  He cites two particular success stories.  One is the market economies of the Pacific, which are also notable for their lack of natural resources.

The other is the revival of Europe.  This was achieved by Adenauer and de Gaulle, "two old-fashioned conservative Catholics, ... whose view of the world had been formed before 1914, but who had remained astonishingly alert to the changes and opportunities which the tragic events of their lifetimes had brought about" (598).

De Gaulle gets Johnson's accolade as "the outstanding statesman of modern times" (596), because he enabled France to reverse the historic trends of the 1930s and again become a dynamic nation.  Churchill and Eisenhower were "the two greatest statesmen of the mid-century" (463).

Eisenhower carefully understated himself.  His decade was the most prosperous of modern times.  He held federal spending despite enormous pressures (464).  Eisenhower said, "There is no defence for any country that busts its own economy".  This makes an interesting contrast with JFK, who apparently invented the term "big government", and described it as "the problem eliminator" (638).  Lyndon Johnson in turn described his domestic spending as "the beautiful woman".  On a different plane, Jimmy Carter said America's power to influence events was "very limited" (674).  Johnson sums up his assessment of the US in the period between Eisenhower and Reagan in the chapter title:  "America's Suicide Attempt".

Johnson's overall assessment of the performance of government is scathing.  He says that the state, whose share of GDP has risen from 5-10 per cent in 1914 to 45 per cent today, "was the great gainer of the twentieth century;  and the central failure" (729).  It has proved "an insatiable spender, an unrivalled waster".  His observation that the twentieth century state has proved "the great killer of all time" shifts the spotlight to social engineering.

SOCIAL ENGINEERING

Stalin collectivised the Russian peasantry at a cost of *some 10 million human lives (271).  Hitler "murdered at least 5,800,000" Jews in the name of the final solution (415).  There are no figures about how many millions died during the Great Leap, when Mao transformed the "economic, political and administrative life" of 700 million people in 7 months (550).  Soviet and satellite policies made refugees of 9 million people in the 1970s (709).

These are the grosser outbursts of social engineering.  But they highlight a virtually universal trend.  Always and everywhere, says Johnson, there are "plans".  "At the democratic end of the spectrum, the political zealot offered New Deals, Great Societies, and Welfare States;  at the totalitarian end, cultural revolutions" (729).

Accordingly, he regards professional politicians as "the great human scourge of the twentieth century" (510).  Johnson hopes that "the age of politics" died in the late 1970s, along with the belief that politics is "the cure for human ills" (729-30).  But he does not put his hopes very high.

The birth of this "political" age arose from many historical circumstances.  Johnson dates the modern world from Einstein's theory of relativity in 1919, and notes how this theory was rapidly confused with moral relativism.  But the environment in which our world was incubated also included the horrors of the War, a greatly expanded government role, the Versailles peace settlement, the Bolshevik Revolution, Freudian psychoanalysis, the decline of religion, the collapse of legitimacy.  It was a potent breeding-ground.

The 1920s were the "last Arcadia" (Ch.6).  The taciturn Calvin Coolidge, US President from 1923-28, and almost universally denigrated ever since, is one of Johnson's heroes.  "No public man carried into modern times more comprehensively the founding principles of Americanism:  hard work, frugality, freedom of conscience, freedom from government, respect for serious culture" (219).

Coolidge said "economy is idealism in its most practical form".  He made out a good case for his legendary terseness:  nine-tenths of a president's callers at the White House "want something they ought not to have.  If you keep dead still they will run out in three or four minutes".  On resigning the Presidency, he snapped at the Press:  "Perhaps one of the most important accomplishments of my administration has been minding my own business" (221).  But the runs were on the board:  by 1929, the United States was contributing a record 34.4 per cent of total world production (228).

During the locust years of the 1930s, a man like Coolidge shines like a star in hell.  As Hitler and Stalin clawed their way through history, the spirit of the Thirties "repudiated the virtues of capitalist enterprise and embraced those of collectivism" (259).  John Strachey is the epitome of Western blindness.  Strachey said:  "To travel from the capitalist world into Soviet territory is to pass from death to birth" (260).

Then came the Second World War, followed by Soviet expansionism and decolonisation.  The new states, in their desire for rapid development, were particularly fertile ground for social engineering and excessive politics.  The management of international affairs became exceedingly difficult, especially when the predominantly left-wing totalitarian and one-party states became numerically preponderant in the United Nations.  These problems are unresolved.

MORAL RELATIVISM

A major theme of the book is the debilitating impact of moral relativism -- the view that values are a matter of opinion, and incapable of ultimate proof or disproof by rational argument.  Johnson blames moral relativism for Hitler's Germany, Stalin's Russia, and modern terrorism.  This overstates the case, for no arguments, valid or not, would ever cut any ice with these dictators.

But the fact remains that moral relativism has led some people to wash their hands of their responsibilities.  This has produced some disastrous consequences:  one example is the "principle introduced by Hammarskjold that killing among Africans is not the UN's business" (537).

Of course moral relativism in no way removes moral dilemmas.  In particular, if argument is impotent against expansionist tyranny, what are good men to do?  This age-old question is far more acute in a world where the reach of totalitarian technology appears unlimited by time or space.

It is in Johnson's view tragic that nobody has been able to give a better answer than the need to respond in kind.  Johnson does not himself offer a solution -- and who can blame him -- although he toys with the old natural law theory (402-3).  But he does spell out the result in the starkest terms:  "moral corruption operates a satanic Gresham's Law, in which evil drives out good" (428).

Johnson has done far more in this book than merely contribute to historical scholarship.  His free market/ limited government interpretation of the modern world adds enormous weight and conviction to the private enterprise cause.