Luke Ford

Stephen Turner writes a chapter called “Carl Friedrich and the Cancellation of Pareto” in the 2023 book, Vilfredo Pareto’s Contributions to Modern Social Theory: A Centennial Appraisal:

* What makes Friedrich of special interest is not only the texts but also the role he and his thought played in forming the self-conception of Harvard faculty and leadership as it emerged during the late Roosevelt administration and World War II as the academic arm of the federal government, where it played the role of an elite and as the academic wing of the national elite. Friedrich was a member, by any standard, of the elite, both German and American. Moreover, he was a major participant in the successful political Griff nach der Weltmacht (Grab for World Power) of Harvard during the period from the mid-1930s, when Harvard celebrated its tercentenary by inviting scholars from all over the world, to the 1960s, when the Kennedy Presidency was dominated by the “thought brigade” (Stuart 1963), overwhelmingly from Harvard. His comments on elites were therefore descriptions and implicit justifications of his own status-or denials of it. This lends his texts and thoughts a special historical interest, notably in relation to Pareto’s own account of elites, and points to reasons to be cautious in interpreting them.

The temporal background of the rise of this new elite is important. Bronislaw Malinowski confided in an unpublished text written shortly after the First World War that “the basic principle of democracy as we find it now is wrong [ and] hence real advance lies in government by detached experts” (quoted in Coleman 2021, p. 99). This was a common perception at the time, promoted in the American public sphere by Walter Lippman. It came to be combined, in the 1930s, with the enthusiasm from intellectuals for the expansion of state power and liberation from a strict interpretation of the constitution under Roosevelt, his “brains trust,” and the expansion of federal regulatory agencies with expert leaders. These were developments the Harvard community generally applauded, and in some key cases, such as the appointment of Felix Frankfurter to the Supreme Court, participated in. But they often did so by treating these developments not as anti-democratic but as the fulfillment of genuine democracy. Friedrich’s writings of the period and indeed throughout his career reflected this climate of opinion, as well as his active membership in this group.

Nor was Friedrich’s role merely intellectual. Not only was Friedrich a prominent figure in the movement to involve the US in the European war, which characterized itself as defending democracy, he played a prominent role in Harvard’s participation in the war effort, especially in the training of officers for the expected occupation, along with Talcott Parsons who used this role as a way of expanding his own power…

“Hitler’s rule was legal, but it was not legitimate; it had a basis in law, but not in right and justice.”

* Pareto was an elitist and therefore anti-democratic, whereas Friedrich defended democratic institutions; Friedrich embraced Kantianism and genuine authority, whereas Pareto ridiculed doctrines, especially Kantianism and Natural Law, that embraced the idea of genuine authority rooted in reason; Friedrich had a rich and humane Kantian view of reason, which included values, whereas Pareto had an odd and narrow view of logical action and scientific method that excluded the rationality of values and exposed their emotional basis and was therefore a form of irrationalism. Friedrich was open and honest, as shown by his various public confessions, while Pareto was disingenuous, elusive, and cynical, as shown by the contradictory and opaque character of his political statements; Friedrich embraced the idea of representation, whereas Pareto dismissed it as “poppycock”; Pareto believed in the inevitability of the rule of the few based on his account of history, whereas Friedrich affirmed the possibility of a future politics of a different more egalitarian kind; Pareto regarded the law as an instrument in the hands of the powerful, whereas Friedrich granted it an intrinsic purposiveness and rationality apart from the aims of its creators; Friedrich believed in universality, emancipation, and the power of reason to bring them about, whereas Pareto celebrated the dark, irrational, and particularistic side of humanity; for Pareto, bureaucracy was a stage of elite decadence, whereas for Friedrich, bureaucracy represented reason itself. The summary is this: Pareto was a Machiavellian who saw ancient and modem regimes as all governed by the rule of the few and their underlying power motivations and regarded this not only as unavoidable but good; Friedrich celebrated the modem state and the superior rationality of its bureaucratic and representative institutions governed by the rule of law and looked forward to more political equality.

* when one encounters an ideology, look for the underlying sentiments and at the group which shares them.

* Pareto is closer to Freud or Jung: he categorizes a long list of residues, or sentiments, drawn from the historical and anthropological literature with an eye toward finding the common features among superficially different ones, with the aim of identifying and grouping them into a systematic classification scheme. He treated the ideologies that derived from these sentiments as more variable responses to transient situations and treated political structures as even more variable results of sentiments and ideologies. This conflicted with the holistic, relativistic view of culture that became fashionable in the interwar period: for Pareto, residues were fundamental and persisted, ideologies and explicit cultural beliefs-that is to say “reasons” other than those of science-were transient and derivative.

* “through the dexterous use of such ambiguous terms as ‘functional’, ‘pragmatic’, ‘realistic’, ‘progressive’, [Carl Friedrich] invests the American ideal of democracy, equality and freedom, with a content which reduces the role of the common man to his status in medieval times.”

* Kantian reason was prone to slipping into overt authoritarianism in the name of reason.

* These governing classes tended to be overthrown; in time, they came to be populated by people he likened to foxes, people who mastered the art of getting their way without force. They lacked, however, the talent and capacity to defend themselves or their rule with force. The people who overthrew and replaced them had those talents. He likened them to lions. History was a graveyard of elites. Through the process of succession, one elite replaced another.1 An elite could prolong its rule by co optation, bringing forceful types into the ruling class. But there was a tendency for this not to happen and for the lions to replace the old governing class. Both were examples of “circulation.” The governing classes did indeed have special talents and capacities. But the capacities of foxes were different from those of lions (Pareto [1935] 1963, vol. IV, §2178, pp. 1515-1516). The theory implied that the governing class would become corrupt and be replaced if they were not open to outside talent of a different kind, which would have to, by definition, come from outside the governing class. Normally, the governing class became closed, fox-like, and vulnerable to challenge from below.

* Lincoln was an outsider to the foxes who dominated late antebellum American politics and had failed to solve the slavery question. He came with a following that transformed the federal system after his death-a transformation carried out not by the foxes but by the pride of lions who had risen to prominence through their military service in the Civil War and the radical Republicans, who took over and expanded the Federal government-only to be themselves followed by foxes.

* A sovereign or parliament “occupies the stage. But behind the scenes there are always people who play a very important role in actual government.”

* Bureaucrats operated in this way. They were the ones who carried out the law by taking “measures,” a concept Friedrich emphasized, in contrast to legislation, as the place where governance happens. They did so with discretionary power, which he also emphasized, but always with a sense of the limits imposed by the potential reactions of others. The picture we get is this: politicians propose, bureaucrats dispose, and in the way they want, unless they provoke a reaction…

Rony Guldmann wrote in his work-in-progress Conservative Claims of Cultural Oppression:

Fascism is defined, not by rabid nationalism as such, but by a set of emotional or instinctual impulses that fuel an uncompromising quest for community, the “urge to ‘get beyond’ politics, a faith in the perfectibility of man and the authority of experts, and an obsession with the aesthetics of youth.”21 Fascism calls upon man “to lay aside the anachronisms of natural law, traditional religion, constitutional liberty, capitalism, and the like and rise to the responsibility of remaking the world in his own image.”22 To this end, it sanctions an all-powerful state led by “an enlightened avant-garde who would serve as the authentic, organic voice of the ‘general will.’”

Was Carl Friedrich pushing a kind of liberal fascism? Does not liberalism want to get beyond politics by rendering neutral as much of the political as possible (initially that meant neutralizing the ability of religion to set men at each other’s throats, and then liberal neutralization came for the politics of race, sex, immigration and other hot button issues), and hence under the rule of experts rather than voters? Does not liberalism believe in the authority of experts? Does not liberalism reject “the anachronisms of natural law, traditional religion, constitutional liberty, capitalism, and the like”? Liberalism does not abide the “uncompromising quest for community” because that tramples on human rights. It does not worship the aesthetics of youth. Different types of liberalism react differently to the idea of “an all-powerful state led by an enlightened avant-garde who would serve as the authentic, organic voice of the ‘general will.’”