Jean-François Revel (1/19/1924-5/30/2006)was, as Henri Astier has correctly pointed out, was a European classical liberal admirer of American individualism. The more than thirty books, including Anti-Americanism, How Democracies Perish and, perhaps his best-known Without Marx or Jesus which he authored are often frustrating in their density, and frequently leaves one desiring that he not be, well, quite so"French" in his thinking, but he was a French writer in the best sense of the term. Astier says, he

was not just the grand old man of French political literature; he was a leading exponent of freedom in the tradition of Raymond Aron, Alexis de Tocqueville and Baron Montesquieu.

Revel, initially a philosopher, made his name in 1957 with a critique of the intellectual fashions of the time, Pourquoi les Philosophes? (Why Philosophers?). The book contended that philosophy, having spawned a host of disciplines – mathematics, physics, biology, history and the social sciences, as well as the scientific method itself – was itself no longer a creative force...

In the 1960s Revel continued to contribute to the history of ideas, with a book on Proust and a history of western philosophy. He ventured into politics at the end of the decade with his first international bestseller, Without Marx or Jesus (1970) [which].... argued that today’s true progressive force was not Marxist collectivism but US-style individualism. "The 20th-century revolution will take place in the United States", Revel wrote. "It can only unfold there, and it has started to do so. It will spread to the rest of the world only if it succeeds in North America."

...his defence of freedom and human rights as absolutes brought him head-to-head with the emerging Marxist left. In The Totalitarian Temptation (1976) and How Democracies Perish (1983), Revel noted that western capitalism, which carried with it an unprecedented degree of wealth and freedom, was rejected by"progressives" as odious, while communism, which produced only misery and tyranny, was regarded as attractive.

The communist danger, as he saw it, was as much moral as military. Democrats, especially on the left, no longer believed in their own values, and even adopted the mental reflexes of totalitarianism (character assassination, doublethink, wilful disregard for facts, and propaganda). Revel deplored what he regarded as an intellectual surrender, and concluded that the west was hopeless at exploiting its own strengths. Democracies, he feared, were bent more on rushing to their own enemy's rescue than on self-preservation: in the end the law of political evolution might lead to the"survival of the least fit"...

Revel never argued that communism could not be vanquished. He said it was irreversible only insofar as it could not be reformed. Ever since Without Marx or Jesus he had always argued that the Soviet Union was an unmitigated disaster. As he wrote in The Totalitarian Temptation:"The only way to improve communism is to remove it."

The purpose of How Democracies Perish was to urge the west to stand up for its own values. The book sought to show that communist totalitarianism was beyond redemption and should not be placated, and that the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics owed its continued survival to its repressive apparatus and the complacent help of democracies.

In Democracy Against Itself (1992) Revel lambasts the idea – fashionable at the time – that communism had always been headed for the dustbin of history and that alarm had been misplaced: "It is a little bit as if someone said: 'You can see there was no reason to be worried in 1805 about Napoleon because in 1815 he was in St Helena.' The whole point is that he ended up there as a result of actions by leaders and peoples, not because in 1805 Napoleon was not dangerous or was bound to go out."

...To the very end, Revel remained true to the doctrine that gives his whole work strength and coherence: classical liberalism, i.e. a belief in individual rights and markets underpinned by the rule of law.

...Revel was always uncomfortable with the conservative label that was attached to him from the late 1970s. Many of the libertarian values he had always championed had indeed migrated to the intellectual right. But he was never close to the Gaullists, whom he knew to be worshippers of the state. Revel’s natural political home was the shrinking space in the centre, where France’s liberal misfits from both the right and the left tend to converge.

The 20th-century thinker Revel was closest to was George Orwell – who also blamed his contemporaries for ignoring the mortality of democracy and for siding with its Nazi and communist enemies....

Revel’s most Orwellian work – and perhaps his most profound – was The Flight from Truth (1988; one may find the French title more telling: La Connaissance inutile). The book dissects with clinical precision the flexibility of the human mind, its ability to sift information to suit our prejudices:

"The tragedy of our societies is not that we lack the data we need to make informed choices, but that we choose to ignore them. It is true that technology and science are thriving, and we have learned to think rationally on specific projects, like building planes or setting up unit-trust funds. But outside our speciality, we are as prone to superstition and illogical thinking as Neolithic men."

Revel, who has researched the subject thoroughly, traces a catalogue of fallacies peddled from America to Zimbabwe by"opinion makers" who are in fact slaves to humanity’s primeval preference for mental comfort over knowledge. The main point of Flight from Truth, however, is not that humans are unredeemable liars. On the contrary, just like Orwell, Revel exhorts us to make use of our capacity to take in reality and see what is in front of our noses. "This is important to democratic civilisation, because freedom thrives as much on truth and honesty as tyranny does on lying and cheating."

...Although Revel was largely misunderstood by the intelligentsia, his books were indeed huge successes. He was arguably the most powerful and influential of all 20th-century anti-totalitarian writers. Liberty has lost an irreplaceable champion.

Just a thought.
Just Ken
CLASSical Liberalism

George II and his people have made frightening claims about the scope of the allegedly inherent and implied powers of the presidency. Under this doctrine, a president may do anything in the name of fighting a war. Since in the administration's view the current and implicitly permanent "war on terror" includes the U.S. in the battlefield, the president can pretty much ignore the Bill of Rights even for citizens. Bye-bye Fourth Amendment protections. See ya, habeas corpus. Laws and treaties, forbidding torture, for example, can be ignored. Etc. Etc. Etc.

From my reading so far, opponents of Bush's"unitary executive" doctrine seem to have the better constitutional argument. But if he turns out to be right, then it only goes to show you what's wrong with the Constitution. As Spooner said, either it authorized the government we have or it was powerless to prevent it. In either case, who needs it?

On the subject of the"unitary executive," and federal power in general under George II, see the new Cato Institute publication "Power Surge: The Constitutional Record of George W. Bush," by my old friends and former colleagues Gene Healy and Timothy Lynch. From the executive summary:

Unfortunately, far from defending the Constitution, President Bush has repeatedly sought to strip out the limits the document places on federal power. In its official legal briefs and public actions, the Bush administration has advanced a view of federal power that is astonishingly broad, a view that includes

* a federal government empowered to regulate core political speech -- and restrict it greatly when it counts the most: in the days before a federal election;

* a president who cannot be restrained, through validly enacted statutes, from pursuing any tactic he believes to be effective in the war on terror;

* a president who has the inherent constitutional authority to designate American citizens suspected of terrorist activity as"enemy combatants," strip them of any constitutional protection, and lock them up without charges for the duration of the war on terror -- in other words, perhaps forever; and

* a federal government with the power to supervise virtually every aspect of American life, from kindergarten, to marriage, to the grave.

President Bush's constitutional vision is, in short, sharply at odds with the text, history, and structure of our Constitution, which authorizes a government of limited powers.

Also, see this Boston Globe article by Charlie Savage. It begins:

President Bush has quietly claimed the authority to disobey more than 750 laws enacted since he took office, asserting that he has the power to set aside any statute passed by Congress when it conflicts with his interpretation of the Constitution. . . .

Legal scholars say the scope and aggression of Bush's assertions that he can bypass laws represent a concerted effort to expand his power at the expense of Congress, upsetting the balance between the branches of government. The Constitution is clear in assigning to Congress the power to write the laws and to the president a duty"to take care that the laws be faithfully executed." Bush, however, has repeatedly declared that he does not need to"execute" a law he believes is unconstitutional.

The president's strategy has been pointed out about by several commentators (see the article linked above). In five and a half years he has vetoed no bills. Yet he claims the power to ignore any and all provisions of bills passed by Congress, thus giving himself, de facto, the line-item veto, but without an opportunity for Congress to override it. In several cases he has negotiated compromises in a bill in order win passage, only to say later in a"signing letter" that he has no intention of enforcing those sections. Members of his own party have complained about this treachery. According to Bruce Fein, a conservative constitutional scholar with integrity,"This is an attempt by the president to have the final word on his own constitutional powers, which eliminates the checks and balances that keep the country a democracy. There is no way for an independent judiciary to check his assertions of power, and Congress isn't doing it, either. So this is moving us toward an unlimited executive power."

Cross-posted at Free Association.

It occurred to me that I was too easy on the recently late John Kenneth Galbraith the other day. In the Wall Street Journal Tuesday, David Henderson reminded us:

He was also Kennedy's ambassador to India in the early 1960s. While there, Galbraith gave a series of speeches on economic development in which he hailed the role of government planning as opposed to economic freedom. In one speech, Galbraith stated,"The market cannot reach forward to take great strides when these are called for. . . . To trust to the market is to take an unacceptable risk that nothing, or too little, will happen." As is well known, the Indian government did not take the"risk" of relying on the market but, instead, stuck with its system of detailed controls over every industry. As is also well known, nothing, or too little, happened. India was mired in poverty which only began to lift after some decontrol started in 1991.

Where Galbraith says"the market" substitute"the ingenuity of free individuals." So, Galbraith is one of the people responsible for untold death, starvation, and misery -- and not just in India. Not bad for an arrogant elitist (and a collectivist moralizer masquerading as an economic"scientist") who probably never got his hands dirty.

Cross-posted at Free Association.

Over at Cato (and previously on FoxNews.com), I have an overview and update piece on Sal Culosi, the Virginia optometrist shot and killed by a local SWAT team. Culosi's" crime" was wagering on sports with a group of friends.

Since his death last January, Fairfax County officials have intimidated the dead man's friends and family (likely in anticipation of the family's lawsuit); refused to name, discipline, or prosecute the officer who pulled the trigger; and generally frustrated the Culosi family's attempts to hold the appropriate people accountable for the shooting.

Police excess seems to thrive in the Virginia suburbs. In June of 2004, police in tiny Manassas Park staged a massive SWAT raid on a local tavern, conveniently under the guise of an alcohol inspection, which precluded the need for a search warrant. They found nothing, but they've since continued to intimidate and harrass the bar's owner.

And in Alexandria, just down the road from me, an off-duty police officer shot and killed an unarmed teenager whom he suspected of walking out on a $20 tab at IHOP. There too, police and city officials have been less than forthcoming and cooperative about providing details of the incident.

"There are two sorts of forecasters. Those who don't know, and those who don't know they don't know."

John Kenneth Galbraith, who died Saturday aged 97.

Galbraith was noted for his wit and sagacity (click on image). Here is another of his quips:"If all else fails, immortality can always be achieved by a spectacular mistake."

Although Galbraith's economics left a lot to be desired (to put it mildly), he wrote very well. If only more libertarian economists had Galbraith's eloquence and wit. Two notable examples of good style and good economics are Milton Friedman's Capitalism and Freedom and David Ramsay Steele's From Marx to Mises. Read and enjoy.