We are all familiar with the wonderful descriptive term, “the welfare-warfare state.” Ron Paul frequently uses it, as does Lew Rockwell, Justin Raimondo, Thomas Woods, and myself. Murray 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,” at the same time his American counterpart was waging his own war of coercive national unification. Bismarck, in creating the ideological justification for what became “the welfare-warfare state,” gave birth to the paradigm which continues to invigorate and mold the American political landscape of today.
Because of the tremendous number of key American intellectuals who studied in Germany during the time of Bismarck in preparation for their doctorate degrees (or in post-doctoral studies), and who returned emboldened and willing to use the state to transform society, the Progressive Movement was born. Although not household names today, these highly influential men included Richard Ely, Albion Woodbury Small, W. E. B. DuBois, Franz Boas, Walter Weyl, Nicholas Murray Butler, Edmund J. James, Walter Rauschenbusch, E. R. A. Seligman, Henry C. Adams, John W. Burgess, William James, George Santayana, Henry Farnam, George Herbert Mead, Frank Taussig, Simon Patten, John Bates Clark, Herbert Baxter Adams, Arthur T. Hadley. Each of them has had a long lasting impact on American society through their ideas and the subsequent generations these ideas shaped.
Ideas do not exist in a sterile vacuum but are often intertwined and serendipitously related to each other. Such is the case of various statist doctrines that came to fruition in the 19th century, and which still dramatically affect our world today. “Scientific racism,” “social Darwinism,” eugenics, Comtean positivism, imperialism, and “social imperialism,” were pseudoscientific rationales for the expansionary and invasive welfare-warfare state at home and abroad.
As Princeton’s Thomas C. Leonard noted in his seminal article, “Eugenics and Economics in the Progressive Era:”
1:27 pm on June 20, 2015Progressive opposition to laissez faire was motivated by a set of deep intellectual commitments regarding the relationship between social science, social scientific expertise and right governance. The progressives were committed to 1) the explanatory power of scientific (especially statistical) social inquiry to get at the root causes of social and economic problems; 2) the legitimacy of social control, which derives from a holist conception of society as prior to and greater than the sum of its constituent individuals; 3) the efficacy of social control via expert management of public administration; where 4) expertise is both sufficient and necessary for the task of wise public administration.
