Le Bon and the Road to Serfdom before Hayek, and Judith Butler

This progressive restriction of liberties shows itself in every country in a special shape which Herbert Spencer has not pointed out; it is that the passing of these innumerable series of legislative measures, all of them in a general way of a restrictive order, conduces necessarily to augment the number, the power, and the influence of the functionaries charged with their application.
These functionaries tend in this way to become the veritable masters of civilised countries. Their power is all the greater owing to the fact that, amidst the incessant transfer of authority, the administrative caste is alone in being untouched by these changes, is alone in possessing irresponsibility, impersonality, and perpetuity. There is no more oppressive despotism than that which presents itself under this triple form.
   This incessant creation of restrictive laws and regulations, surrounding the pettiest actions of existence with the most complicated formalities, inevitably has for its result the confining within narrower and narrower limits of the sphere in which the citizen may move freely. Victims of the delusion that equality and liberty are the better assured by the multiplication of laws, nations daily consent to put up with trammels increasingly burdensome. They do not accept this legislation with impunity. Accustomed to put up with every yoke, they soon end by desiring servitude, and lose all spontaneousness and energy. They are then no more than vain shadows, passive, unresisting and powerless automata.

    Arrived at this point, the individual is bound to seek outside himself the forces he no longer finds within him. The functions of governments necessarily increase in proportion as the indifference and helplessness of the citizens grow. They it is who must necessarily exhibit the initiative, enterprising, and guiding spirit in which private persons are lacking. It falls on them to undertake everything, direct everything, and take everything under their protection. The State becomes an all-powerful god. Still experience shows that the power of such gods was never either very durable or very strong.

    This progressive restriction of all liberties in the case of certain peoples, in spite of an outward licence that gives them the illusion that these liberties are still in their possession, seems at least as much a consequence of their old age as of any particular system. It constitutes one of the precursory symptoms of that decadent phase which up to now no civilisation has escaped. Judging by the lessons of the past, and by the symptoms that strike the attention on every side, several of our modern civilisations have reached that phase of extreme old age which precedes decadence.--Gustave Le Bon (1986 [1895] [Psychologie des Foules] The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind, pp. 136-7 (translation of second edition published by Dover)

As regular readers know, I have an interest in the pre-history of the road to serfdom thesis (hereafter RTST), which I take to entail that once one democratically switches to an extensively planned economy ('collectivism" in the terminology of the 1930s-40s), the needs of planning and stability will ensure that a dictatorship will follow. For example, I have noted that (recall) in 1938, when reviewing Lippmann's The Good Society, Frank Knight attributes the thesis to Lippmann (which I think is a mistake), but Lippmann, in turn, is inspired by Von Mises (who does endorse a version of RTST and this is familiar to Knight).*

Because Knight think government by discussion is constitutive of democracy, and so permit all kinds of political u-turns, Knight rejects RTST. What Knight, who did not attend the Lippmann colloquium, misses, as Foucault shows, is that for some neo-liberals RTST is not a prediction about the future evolution of political economy, but from the perspective of the ORDOs who lived through the 1930s historical fact in Germany. So, as an analytical tool it has already proved its mettle in shaping liberal self-understanding. (I return to this below.)

I had always assumed that RTST as an analytical tool, was invented by liberals for liberal purposes, even a liberal art of government of the sort that eventually became associated, somewhat narrowly, with Hayek's cold war political economy. But that's wrong because while Le Bon is responding to liberal hegemony (and Spencer's political economy) he is by no means a liberal himself.

We can discern in Le Bon a species, perhaps an ur-species, of RTST. In context Le Bon is interested in linking his analysis of crowds (recall especially juries and parliaments) with a natural even "inevitable" (137) cycle of rise and fall of civilizations. For Le Bon democratic assemblies inevitably create conditions under which they empower the administrative state's ""petty sovereigns." the term is (recall) Judith Butler's, (although I have noted that we find concern with their power in Adam Smith's criticism of Chinese and French centralized, government which empowers such petty sovereigns). And Butler would agree with how despotic such petty sovereigns are.** (Smith would, too, but thinks a corporate monopoly as sovereign is even worse.)

But what Le Bon notices is that the empowering of such administrative petty sovereigns can occur just as much from a democratic center as a more despotic center. This is not a bug, but a virtue of Le Bon's analysis. Because Le Bon rejects the primacy of the idea that institutions shape reality through incentives. Rather for him national culture (what he sometimes calls racial) shapes the function institutions. I hope to return to his important critique of the primacy of incentive-shaping-institutions-paradigm some other time.

While Le Bon is a critic of socialism, I think for him the RTST is a natural effect of any democratic even liberal ("equality and liberty ") parliamentary process. This is, in part, due to the fact that on his view parliaments are incapable of systematically beneficial outcomes guided by true technical expertise.+ Swayed by public opinion, demagogues, and venality, they become themselves like hypnotized automata (characteristic of crowds).+ But it is also due to the fact that in trying to facilitate social friction, their own legislation increases both the number and complexity of laws and simultaneously empowers a technocratic class that becomes unaccountable (and the only class not unfree).

We see here how the RTST is combined with the critique -- later embraced by both libertarians and theorists like Butler -- of the unfreedom of the administrative state which (and here there are republican roots) clothes itself in rule of law, but is excuse for arbitrary power. Strikingly for Le Bon, the rise of such fundamental unfreedom, is compatible with the more illusory sense of emancipation ("outward licence"). That is to say, Le Bon also anticipates the recent, gendered, conservative and neo-marxist criticism of the sexual revolution as a manifestation of neoliberal ideology. 

And because unlike Knight, Le Bon has no faith in the uptake of ideas critical of the fundamental commitments of an age, he has no hope (or interest) in warding off the civilizational collapse to come. Whatever Hayek may or may not have thought, for Le Bon the slippery slope has only one route, down.++

 

 

*This also helps explain Knight's sense that Hayek's RTST was old hat.

**It is an open and important question to what degree modern totalitarianism goes beyond the despotism diagnosed by Le Bon.

+For Le Bon this is partly because there is no genuine knowledge of general social complex. When parliament does pass sound legislation is generally due to lack of interest by most members such that localized specialist knowledge can prevail.

++I am unfamiliar with any references to Le Bon in the writings of Mises and Hayek, but  Rudolf and Walter Eucken as well as Walter Lippmann were careful readers of Le Bon; about that some other time.