Of Greed, Vice and Bernard Mandeville

From The Legacy Of Friedrich Von Hayek: Fascism Didn't Die With Hitler by Jeffrey Steinberg [LaRouche PAC]

On Sept. 3, 1995, EIR editor Jeffrey Steinberg addressed the Schiller Institute/ICLC Labor Day Conference in Tyson's Corner, Va. A transcript of his speech was published in the American Almanac of the New Federalist, where subheads were added.

"...Writing The Road to Serfdom in London in 1944, while teaching at the British Fabian Society's London School of Economics, von Hayek was certainly in no position to pen an apology for Adolph Hitler and National Socialism. Instead, he took a sophisticated detour to arrive at the same end result. Von Hayek denounced National Socialism as a classic expression of statist, totalitarian ideology, and then argued that all forms of dirigist government involvement in the economy strangle freedom, crush the free market, and lead inevitably to Hitlerian totalitarianism.

Von Hayek slandered Friedrich List, Germany's great "American System" economist, and the Weimar-era German political figure, Walter Rathenau, as part of the same "socialist" camp as Hitler and Lenin. Von Hayek let his own Anglophiliac sentiments all hang out, as he pilloried List as the principal author of the "German thesis" that "free trade was a policy dictated solely by, and appropriate only to, the special interests of England in the nineteenth century."

He slandered Walter Rathenau, the German foreign minister whose assassination in 1923 helped break the resistance to the draconian conditionalities that the Versailles Treaty imposed on Germany, and also proved to be a key step toward the Nazi Party's rise to power: "Ideas very similar to these [anti-individualist views] were current in the offices of the German raw-material dictator, Walter Rathenau, who, although he would have shuddered had he realized the consequences of his totalitarian economics, yet deserves a considerable place in any fuller history of the growth of Nazi ideas."

Talk about Nazi ideas! The radical alternatives that von Hayek posed—strict monetarism, near-total deregulation, and Pan-European federalism—were all expressions of the same feudalist outlook that produced Hitler's National Socialism and the thousands of other varieties of Conservative Revolutionism after World War I.

"We shall not rebuild civilization on the large scale," he wrote in The Road to Serfdom. "It is no accident that on the whole there was more beauty and decency to be found in the life of the small peoples, and that among the large ones there was more happiness and content in proportion as they had avoided the deadly blight of centralization." Prince Philip Mountbatten, head of the Worldwide Fund for Nature (WWF), who advocates the genocidal elimination of 80 percent of the world's population, could not have been more explicit.

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Burckhardt attacked the fifteenth century Golden Renaissance as one of the worst events in history. For Burckhardt, the pre-Renaissance feudal alliance between the oligarchy and the Church represented the high point of civilization. It was a theme that von Hayek would take up more than half a century later in The Road to Serfdom, and in another critical work, The Counter-Revolution of Science, which he published in 1952.

In that 1952 book, von Hayek, reflecting the strong influence of Burckhardt, railed against the two great achievements of the Council of Florence and the Golden Renaissance: the creation of the modern nation-state governed by principles of natural law, and the development of modern science. Von Hayek rejected the idea that the individual was capable of creative scientific discovery, describing it as a fraudulent construct, demonstrating the "collectivist prejudices" which he claimed were inherent in all science.

Von Hayek devoted an entire chapter of The Counter-Revolution of Science to an attack against France's L'Ecole Polytechnique, and particularly against its two greatest figures, Gaspare Monge and Lazare Carnot. What he specifically detested about the L'Ecole Polytechnique—which he ridiculed as the "new temple of science" and the "source of the scientistic hubris"—was, in his own words, the L'Ecole's notion that there were "no limits to the power of the human mind and to the extent to which man could hope to harness and control all the forces which had so far threatened and intimidated him." This, he denounced as "a metaphysical fiction."

Von Hayek didn't stop there. He then argued that the L'Ecole Polytechnique was the source of all subsequent socialist ideas, from Henri Saint-Simon, to Auguste Comte, to Karl Marx. He then went one step further. He lumped together as leading Saint-Simonists, the great American System political economists Henry Carey and Friedrich List!

Von Hayek totally rejected the principle that man was created in the image of God. In fact, he traced his own philosophical roots to the early eighteenth century Satanist, Bernard Mandeville. In a lecture he delivered at the British Academy on March 23, 1966, von Hayek lauded Mandeville as a "master mind," as the inventor of modern psychology, and as the true intellectual forbearer of David Hume, Adam Smith, Jeremy Bentham, Carl Savigny and Charles Darwin.

Von Hayek argued in his Mandeville lecture that Mandeville's poem, "The Fable of the Bees," was perhaps the greatest philosophical treatise ever composed. He credited Mandeville with inspiring Adam Smith's argument for the unbridled free market. ..."

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From Civil Disobedience by Benoit Loiseau [Unfold :: Amsterdam Edition]

One contributor is Dutch artist Marc Bijl, who'll present a poster quoting the 18th-century philosopher Bernard Mandeville. The quote reads: 'Trots en ijdelheid hebben meer ziekenhuizen gebouwd dan alle deugden bij elkaar', which translates as 'Pride and vanity have built more hospitals than all the virtues together'. Set to infiltrate hospitals and other public spaces in the city, the work is a reaction to the increasingly privatised healthcare sector and the crisis of the welfare state.

How did the project come about, and what was your interest in Bernard Mandeville?

I came across Mandeville years ago due to a long time interest in enlightened thinkers such as David Hume, Adam Smith and Thomas Hobbes. I found it striking that there wasn't much information available about him in Rotterdam, where he was born and raised. He lived there until he was 25 and then moved to London. I suppose Erasmus is a much more 'politically correct' historical figure for Rotterdam, even though he never actually lived there. It is also interesting to see how enlightened and liberal thinking came closer to the roots of the anarchist movement later – which was my original interest - whereas socialist and communist ideologies were totalitarian by nature. I always found it striking that in certain progressive movements people would rather go for those ideologies.

I once made a giant beehive at Boymans van Beuningen Museum, for the exhibition Dark. The beehive was a dividing structure from the top (money and oil) with the ruling class on the next level, down to the foolers with the church and the media. Then you had the 'protectors', consisting of the army and terrorists, the elite or the art collectors, and finally the people, or exhibition viewer.

I was inspired for this piece by a poster of American industrial workers and communists who wanted to create a union. It was a very simplified propaganda piece about the way society was structured in 1910. I mixed it with the idea of the society as a beehive, where everything works because of greed, corruption and striving competition to please the queen bee. On the walls, I spray painted 'The Fable of the Bees' from Mandeville.

I like the idea of using communist propaganda with liberal capitalist thoughts. I find that they somehow use the same human survivalist desires.

Mandeville's idea of vicious greed - a natural condition allowing individual interests to be self-regulated - shares some similarities with Adam Smith's concept of the invisible hand, founding justification for the ideology of the 'laissez-faire'. As an artist, how do you position yourself in this constant tension between private and public?

As artists, we are constantly shifting from private to public, from studio to street and from institutes to underground avant-garde structures; that is the production phase. The art 'industry' (galleries, collectors, museums) however functions very much like a market place, like any other business model.

Is art working for or against democracy?

It should question democracy and non-democracy, so I would say both. It is a free-thinking obligation of creativity.

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