We are preparing to print Notes on Democracy, the hard-to-find book by H.L. Mencken–strongly recommended to us by William Peterson–and I just can’t resist quoting the following, which is just a slight sample of what is emerging from the remarkable 1920 treatise. Here is Mencken on security and the police:
What the common man longs for in this world, before and above all his other longings, is the simplest and most ignominious sort of peace: the peace of a trusty in a well-managed penitentiary. He is willing to sacrifice everything else to it. He puts it above his dignity and he puts it above his pride. Above all, he puts it above his liberty. The fact, perhaps, explains his veneration for policemen, in all the forms they take–his belief that there is a mysterious sanctity in law, however absurd it may be in fact.
A policeman is a charlatan who offers, in return for obedience, to protect him (a) from his superiors, (b) from his equals, and (c) from himself. This last service, under democracy, is commonly the most esteemed of them all. In the United States, at least theoretically, it is the only thing that keeps ice-wagon drivers, Y.M.C.A. secretaries, insurance collectors and other such human camels from smoking opium, ruining themselves in the night clubs, and going to Palm Beach with Follies girls…Here, though the common man is deceived, he starts from a sound premise: to wit, that liberty is something too hot for his hands—or, as Nietzsche put it, too cold for his spine.
By the way, that’s just a slight bit of it. There are 200 pages of this kind of material. Watch for it.
Oh, just one more:
Under the pressure of fanaticism, and with the mob complacently applauding the show, democratic law tends more and more to be grounded upon the maxim that every citizen is, by nature, a traitor, a libertine, and a scoundrel. In order to dissuade him from his evil-doing the police power is extended until it surpasses anything ever heard of in the oriental monarchies of antiquity.
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This is so timely, given the video that has hit us from Baltimore with the police officer over-reacting (to say the least!) to some skateboarders.
HEROIC!
By the way, that’s just a slight bit of it. There are 200 pages of this kind of material.
Good god, the man yammers on like that for 200 pages? Not that I disagree with him, but if you’re a libertarian you’ve heard this sermon enough to know it by heart. Perhaps he even prefaces it with a Franklin quote.
And anyway, if you want to read someone who takes a blowtorch to democracy in a way that will make you think, opt for Democracy–The God that Failed by Hans-Hermann Hoppe. It’ll burn your eyes clean.
Eliza, i must have quoted the wrong passages to give you the proper character of this work. It will be on line soon so you can see. No, he doesn’t quote Franklin.
I have to agree with Eliza. Whilst I find Mencken eloquent and a firebrand, I think Hoppe is irreplaceable.
Can there not be more than one work on democracy? One thing I find interesting about this book is that Murray didn’t have it in his library, and he completely adored Mencken. This one just seemed to slip through the cracks. In fact, I’ve polled our scholars list and found only two of hundreds who have known about this work. I’ve been reading Mencken for years, and long looked for a more systematic book on politics but never found it until this one.
You can buy it on amazon new for 28.45$
how much will it be on mises.org?
http://www.amazon.com/Notes-Democracy-H-L-Mencken/dp/1406741361/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1203561227&sr=8-1
And anyway, if you want to read someone who takes a blowtorch to democracy in a way that will make you think, opt for Democracy–The God that Failed by Hans-Hermann Hoppe. It’ll burn your eyes clean.
No offense, but I think you got it pretty much a** backwards.
Mencken wrote this long before Hoppe was ever born. Shouldn’t it be the other way around? Shouldn’t Hoppe just be repeating a story all libertarians know too well? By the way, I get rather annoyed with the whole “anti-democracy” crowd of libertarians to begin with. They talk about this hatred for democracy, but so many are so willing to vehemently defend their precious American Republic.
Give me a break. At least in a direct democracy individuals are take as individuals. In the “republic” you’re nothing more but a drone represented by your feudal lord.
It will be half that price AND have a beautiful and creative cover. I think that Murray would be thrilled.
That’s great to hear. Can’t wait to get my hands on a copy.
It seems you and I have similar concerns for certain bland sweeping assertions, N.A. :\ Similarly, a Republic in its most basic no-frills definition is a society that isn’t a Monarchy.
“Give me a break. At least in a direct democracy individuals are take as individuals. In the “republic” you’re nothing more but a drone represented by your feudal lord.”
You mean anyone in the majority are taken as individuals, and the rest are run ramshod via whim, caprice, and popular sentiment. Ochlocracy has no more inherent protections of redicivus feudalism than does a republic or any other organization of society. So, in a plebiscitary democracy, none of which exists so no empirical evidence can save you, there are no voted representatives in whom we trust to make decisions? At least in a constitutional republic with democratic institutions, which is what we live in, the minority has institutionalized rights.
Looking forward to the book, Mencken is the man. He could kick Chuck Norris’ arse.
Very much looking forward to this!
I feel that Mencken represented views which are still underappreciated even among libertarians, including his critiques on this subject. Really, his attacks on democracy are generally quite different from Hoppe’s, AFAIK. Also, he wrote far more eloquently against democracy (and everything else) than others tend to write, including Hoppe. That’s not meant to single out Hoppe by the way; I think it’s fair to say that among philosophers, social theorists, economists and the like, the artistic composers of writing (e.g. Mencken, Bastiat, Nietzsche) are the exception by far. But it must be said that clear, striking, persuasive expression of ideas is as important as having notions of them, to your audience, if not also for your own better understanding.
I loved Mencken long before loving any other libertarian. It’s his attitude, not just what he is saying. He can make you mad and make you laugh with the same sentence. Mencken understood what Rand later expressed as the “impotence of evil” and the “sanction of the victim”. They understood that it isn’t just villains and victims, it’s villains and fools.
Democracy means that might makes right. It is mob rule with rightious rhetoric.
I will buy this book the moment Mises.org makes it available.
Hoppe’s quip about our temporary custodians looting the system while they can in the limited? time they serve always cracks me up like it does the audience too!
Priceless!
Not picking nits, but for clarification was this supposed to be “trustee”?
…”the peace of a trusty in a well-managed penitentiary”……
Delighted to find out that the Mises Institute is reprinting Mencken’s Notes On Democracy, introducing it to a whole new generation of readers. I first read it over 30 ago. There is nothing quite like it. I have a 1926 first edition copy. I would like to share one choice passage from this incredible volume:
“For what democracy needs most of all is a party that will separate the good that is in it theoretically from the evils that beset it practically, and then try to erect that good into a workable system. What it needs beyond everything is a party of liberty. It produces, true enough, occasional libertarians, just as despotism produces occasional regicides, but it treats them in the same drum-head way. It will never have a party of them until it invents and installs a genuine aristocracy, to breed them and secure them.”
This specific passage inspired Libertarian Party founder David Nolan to choose the name “Libertarian” for the new political party organization he was prompted to put together after viewing Richard Nixon’s infamous August 15, 1971 speech calling for Congressional imposition of wage and price controls, and the breaking of the last remaining link of the U. S. dollar to gold.
This particular speech also inspired a certain Texas baby doctor to seriously consider undertaking a second career path as a United States Congressman in order to educate the American public about the horrific monetary consequences of Nixon’s Keynesian leap into economic fascism.
Perhaps I should declare a bias. Mencken is a gifted prose stylist, but his ideas seem almost conventional in this age, and his tone annoys me. Here is a nutshell of Mencken on democracy:
I have spoken hitherto of the possibility that democracy may be a self-limiting disease, like measles. It is, perhaps, something more: it is self-devouring. One cannot observe it objectively without being impressed by its curious distrust of itself—its apparently ineradicable tendency to abandon its whole philosophy at the first sign of strain. I need not point to what happens invariably in democratic states when the national safety is menaced. All the great tribunes of democracy, on such occasions, convert themselves, by a process as simple as taking a deep breath, into despots of an almost fabulous ferocity. Lincoln, Roosevelt and Wilson come instantly to mind: Jackson and Cleveland are in the background, waiting to be recalled. Nor is this process confined to times of alarm and terror: it is going on day in and day out. Democracy always seems bent upon killing the thing it theoretically loves. I have rehearsed some of its operations against liberty, the very cornerstone of its political metaphysic….
I enjoy democracy immensely. It is incomparably idiotic, and hence incomparably amusing. Does it exalt dunderheads, cowards, trimmers, frauds, cads? Then the pain of seeing them go up is balanced and obliterated by the joy of seeing them come down. Is it inordinately wasteful, extravagant, dishonest? Then so is every other form of government: all alike are enemies to laborious and virtuous men. Is rascality at the very heart of it? Well, we have borne that rascality since 1776, and continue to survive. In the long run, it may turn out that rascality is necessary to human government, and even to civilization itself – that civilization, at bottom, is nothing but a colossal swindle. I do not know: I report only that when the suckers are running well the spectacle is infinitely exhilarating. But I am, it may be, a somewhat malicious man: my sympathies, when it comes to suckers, tend to be coy. What I can’t make out is how any man can believe in democracy who feels for and with them, and is pained when they are debauched and made a show of. How can any man be a democrat who is sincerely a democrat?
Hear, hear! And well said. But then, said so many times in one form or another over the last century. It pains me to say it, but some libertarians do have a gassy, pretentious streak (present company excepted), and can often be found delivering bombastic speeches to each other wherein the same points are made over and over. Then there is the obligatory contest to see who can heap the most contempt upon our fellow citizens–the mindless imbeciles who have failed to recognize their slavery but would nevertheless have no trouble functioning successfully in the society we imagine.
But then Mencken’s an ace at that too:
[D]emocracy gives [the beatification of mediocrity] a certain appearance of objective and demonstrable truth. The mob man, functioning as citizen, gets a feeling that he is really important to the world – that he is genuinely running things. Out of his maudlin herding after rogues and mountebanks there comes to him a sense of vast and mysterious power—which is what makes archbishops, police sergeants, the grand goblins of the Ku Klux and other such magnificoes happy. And out of it there comes, too, a conviction that he is somehow wise, that his views are taken seriously by his betters – which is what makes United States Senators, fortune tellers and Young Intellectuals happy.
Then there is Hoppe, who successfully attempts to blaze a new trail. Here he is in the introduction laying out his route:
The following studies are written from the vantage point of modern Austrian social theory. Throughout, the influence of Ludwig von Mises and even more of Murray N. Rothbard is noticeable….
[T]he following studies can in two regards claim originality. On the one hand, they provide for a more profound understanding of modern political history….[N]either Mises nor Rothbard made a systematic attempt to search for a cause of the decline of classical liberal thought and laissez-faire capitalism and the concomitant rise of anti-capitalist political ideologies and statism during the 20th century…. I will explain the rapid growth of state power in the course of the 20th century lamented by Mises and Rothbard as the systematic outcome of democracy and the democratic mindset, i.e., the (erroneous) belief in the efficiency and/or justice of public property and popular (majority) rule.
On the other hand, based on this deeper, “revisionist” understanding of modern history, the following studies arrive also at a “better” – clearer and more acute – understanding of the constructive alternative to the democratic status quo, i.e., a natural order. There are detailed explanations regarding the operation of a natural order as a state-less social system with freely financed insurance agencies serving as competitive providers of law and order. And there are equally detailed discussions of strategic matters. In particular, there are detailed discussions specifically of secession and of privatization as the primary vehicles and means by which to overcome democracy and establish a natural order.
I disagree with Hoppe on many points, but I haven’t thought that hard since I read a book on Einstein’s theories, and my own positions on the points of disagreement are much sharper.
Command of language is one thing; to be obssesively giving demonstrations uggh/
A starry-eyed praiser of “aristocracy”. What’s that about? Completely of his time.
Subsuming Nietzcshe beneath his wing as if they understood each other perfectly (I don’t think he did).
I guess if the State Legislature of Arkansas passed a motion to pray for his soul he must’ve been something of a sword, but I don’t get that from his books of articles (yes, I’ve read them).
Eliza,
“Good god, the man yammers on like that for 200 pages? Not that I disagree with him, but if you’re a libertarian you’ve heard this sermon enough to know it by heart. Perhaps he even prefaces it with a Franklin quote.”
Quite frankly, I found your comment to be unkind. You might take into consideration that Jeffrey has been very dedicated to this library program. I can’t even begin to imagine the number of hours he has devoted to it.
I’ve seen in your other postings that you’ve read Einstein and Hoppe, which I guess in your mind puts you ahead of the pack; but please bear in mind that not everyone is so well read as you, and therefore may not be so jaded. I’m sure that there are others who will find Mencken’s material to be interesting.
“It pains me to say it, but some libertarians do have a gassy, pretentious streak (present company excepted), and can often be found delivering bombastic speeches to each other wherein the same points are made over and over. “
It happens quite frequently that when libertarians with those “gassy, pretentious streaks” are delivering their “bombastic” speeches, that there may be a fresh pair of ears close by. Given the right time and place, and an audience who is more than ready to listen, the message will spread. BTW, I don’t find Ron Paul to be “bombastic.”
Or should the message be stilled, simply because it bores you to hear it?
Re the police. They were once considered to be public servants. Now, like children, the public is expected to be seen and not heard…silent unless spoken to.
Mencken understood that political society is a slow-motion collective suicide, willingly enjoyed by both politicians and voters. His great humor comes from shining a spotlight not so much on the tragic injustice as on the craven hypocracy of it all.
He understood that nearly all humans believe deeply in individual rights when they are about to be lynched, and believe just as deeply in majority rule when they want to lynch someone else.
Mencken had gusto – bags of it. His is not pale, academic writing, but (to use an old Ayn Rand expression) “laughter let loose in the universe.” (Except Mencken’s is a sardonic, bitter, gut-busting laugh.) He was an *entertainer* as well as a thinker, and reading him is the precise equivalent of going to a show. He intends to tickle and anger.
If you’re looking for something serious to study, he will merely irritate you. The difference here is that between studying a tome in a university library, and going to a gaudy movie or to one of Carlin’s best one-man shows (if Carlin had an even higher IQ than he already has, and used early 20th-Century expressions rather than curse words).
The content of Mencken’s ideas was frankly elitist. He strongly sympathized with the German monarchy. He started, in his early book “Men vs. the Man,” as a rugged individualist of the social Darwinist school (once exquisitely translating and several times imperfectly explaining Nietzcshe for America); the Palmer raids and the specific persecutions of German-Americans (he was one) in World War I scarred him badly, and thereafter he was fully committed to a view of America a “zoo” and Americans as clowns. Most of his activity was not political, but literary (a working journalist, he edited two influential literary magazines and his masterwork is on the American language). He did not go to college; his erudition was staggering, but he was an autodidact and newspaperman just at home in a barroom or at a hanging of murderers as in a lofty academic situation. That was his context. He did not do badly.
Walter Lippmann said of Mencken’s gorgeous writing: “He calls you a swine, and an imbecile, and he increases your will to live.” That’s the Mencken project in a nutshell.
This book is a must read. Thanks to LvMI for bringing it back into print. Mencken was actually quite unique for his time — he attacked everybody. Conservative-leaning libertarians tend to believe there was some libertarian golden age, perhaps before the New Deal. Mencken disposes of this myth — American democracy has always been a total sham.
This book is a must read. Thanks to LvMI for bringing it back into print. Mencken was actually quite unique for his time — he attacked everybody. Conservative-leaning libertarians tend to believe there was some libertarian golden age, perhaps before the New Deal. Mencken disposes of this myth — American democracy has always been a total sham.
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