In Jeff Thomas’ article on LRC today, Is Collectivism Inevitable? he discusses a distant relative of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, one Clinton Roosevelt, who was the author of Science of Government Founded Upon Natural Law.
Dr. Emmanuel Josephson, an indefatigable researcher into the arcane hidden dimensions of American history, economics, and politics (and who was a particular favorite of economist/historian Murray N. Rothbard for his utilization of an early primitive version of power elite analysis, e. g., see “Only One Heartbeat Away” in the September 1974 edition of The Libertarian Forum) republished this volume within his own book, Roosevelt’s Communist Manifesto.
In 1948, the celebrated Dr. Josephson wrote The Strange Death of Franklin D. Roosevelt: A History of the Roosevelt-Delano Dynasty — America’s Royal Family. Josephson was a great independent researcher and anti-establishment muckraker. He was a sworn enemy of the Morgans, the Rockefellers, FDR and the New Deal, the Communists, the Nazis, the Socialists, the Fascists, the Council on Foreign Relations, and the Fed. He traced the origins of what Rothbard later dubbed “the welfare-warfare state” to Bismarck.
We are all familiar with the wonderful descriptive term, “the welfare-warfare state.” Ron Paul frequently uses it, as does Lew Rockwell, the late Justin Raimondo, Tom Woods, and myself. Murray N. Rothbard coined it in his brilliant essay, “The Great Society: A Libertarian Critique,” in Marvin E. Gettleman & David Mermelstein, ed., The Great Society Reader: The Failure of American Liberalism, 1967. This is one of three crucial articles by Rothbard which defines and outlines this important concept describing our society today and how it became that way. The other two articles are: “Origins of the Welfare State in America,” and “World War I as Fulfillment: Power and the Intellectuals.”
The concept has its origin with Chancellor Otto von Bismarck, who united Germany under his doctrine of “Blood and Iron.” Bismarck, in creating the ideological justification for what became “the welfare-warfare state,” approached the revolutionary Karl Marx to edit one of Germany’s leading publications. Marx refused. But the important thing is that Bismarck felt that the pliable Marx was approachable and capable of being co-opted and compromised. This has not gone unnoticed by history.
Bismarxism! I always loved that wonderful connotative term since first encountering it decades ago in Josephson’s The Strange Death of Franklin D. Roosevelt: A History of the Roosevelt-Delano Dynasty — America’s Royal Family, where he provided a rather comprehensive yet not scholarly rigorous outline of the genealogy of the concept. Also check out this unusual source for the idea. Michail Bakunin, the Russian anarcho-communist and great rival of Marx in the International saw this ideological confluence and connection and described it here. Check out this prophetic passage:
But in the People’s State of Marx, there will be, we are told, no privileged class at all. All will be equal, not only from the juridical and political point of view, but from the economic point of view. At least that is what is promised, though I doubt very much, considering the manner in which it is being tackled and the course it is desired to follow, whether that promise could ever be kept. There will therefore be no longer any privileged class, but there will be a government, and, note this well, an extremely complex government, which will not content itself with governing and administering the masses politically, as all governments do to-day, but which will also administer them economically, concentrating in its own hands the production and the just division of wealth, the cultivation of land, the establishment and development of factories, the organization and direction of commerce, finally the application of capital to production by the only banker, the State. All that will demand an immense knowledge and many “heads overflowing with brains” in this government. It will be the reign of scientific intelligence, the most aristocratic, despotic, arrogant and contemptuous of all regimes. There will be a new class, a new hierarchy of real and pretended scientists and scholars, and the world will be divided into a minority ruling in the name of knowledge and an immense ignorant majority. And then, woe betide the mass of ignorant ones!
Because of the tremendous number of key American intellectuals who studied in Germany to gain their doctorate degrees during the time of Bismarck, and who returned emboldened and willing to use the state to transform society, the Progressive Era was born. Intellectuals and politicians were drawn to Progressivism by the same elitist positivism that drew them to other “social control” rationalizations; commitment to the explanatory power of scientific social inquiry to get at the root causes of social and economic problems; the legitimacy of coercive social control, deriving from a holist conception of society as prior to and greater than the sum of its constituent individuals; and the efficacy of elitist social control via expert management of the state apparatus.
12:35 pm on December 23, 2020
