The Menace of the Herd
The first thing to say about The Menace of the Herd (1943), now available in PDF and in Print on Demand, is that it is no longer $500 as it is on Amazon.
Second, it is not by "Francis Stuart Campbell" but rather Erik Ritter von Kuehnelt-Leddihn.
Third, the author has to be one of the most impossible men of the 20th century: impossible in the sense that one almost can't believe a person like this existed. He seems more like an 17th or 18th or 19th century Euro- intellectual- aristocrat -- dazzling knowledge of just about everything--than a writer from the 20th century. But there he was, and he left an amazing legacy in several books you can spend your whole life reading and learning from.
This is his most rare. It is an all-out attack on mob rule as the key to democratic totalitarianism. It is surely one of the most thorough-going anti-Nazi works ever written, especially because he understands the relationship between social and economic control (socialism) and the Nazi state. The book is not especially friendly to market economics, but it has other virtues: essentially the author does not believe that the state should make law, and he explains why. To read him is to experience something of an intellectual liberation from every sort of conventional wisdom, and yes there are some very un-PC parts of this book, but the reader should try to be as liberally minded as its author, and then we can all learn. I'm just so happy--we all are--that this book is back to life.
Comments (9)
Andrew Rogers
I'm a big fan of K-L, and you're right that this is a wonderful, enlightening book. The section at the end on the history of "the Germanies" is an education in itself.
It is true that he is "not especially friendly to market economics" here, and tries to chart a path between socialism on the one hand and "Manchester liberalism" on the other. In K-L's defense, though, by the time of his later, better-known books, he's given up on that and at one point says flat-out "There is no 'Third Way.'" He describes himself in "Leftism Revisited" as "a Christian conservative anarchist."
He's also got some of the best footnotes of any author I know.
Published: February 15, 2007 5:24 PM
Geoffrey Allan Plauche
An Amazon reviewer notes that the book is by K-L writing under the name of Francis Stuart Campbell. Amazon itself has both names listed as the author.
Published: February 15, 2007 5:55 PM
Benjamin Marks
This is Kuehnelt-Leddihn's best book. (I have the Gordon Press edition.) His statism in no way detracts from the joy of reading it. Reading Chesterton is a similar situation.
Published: February 15, 2007 6:13 PM
Stranger
Why did he use a nom de plume?
Published: February 15, 2007 6:39 PM
Andrew Rogers
Why did he use a nom de plume?
My assumption was always that, since this book was published in 1943, he figured Americans were not so interested in reading books by authors with Germanic names. I've also read (on the print-on-demand page Jeff links to above, for example) that he may have been trying to protect family back home in occupied Austria.
Published: February 15, 2007 9:02 PM
jdavidb
Is that saying be as liberal-minded as the author of this book, or as liberal-minded as Jeffrey Tucker? :)
Published: February 15, 2007 9:55 PM
jeffrey
Whoops, that is ambiguous! changing.
Published: February 16, 2007 6:19 AM
Bill
Not especially friendly to free-market economics? You mean not especially friendly to PRIVATE PROPERTY rights.
From ownership rights of property come mutually beneficial exchanges of property. From these exchanges come a division of labor and a free society.
There is NO other political or economic system upon which society can peacefully exist other than one based on private property and mutually beneficial exchange. ALL others use coersion and ultimately violence to keep society organized.
Even some really smart folks can not get this simple concept?
Published: February 17, 2007 4:27 PM
Daniel M. Ryan
From the book (p. 34, p. 48 pf PDF file):
"Nobody wants to serve, nobody
wants to be subjected because service in a nonhierarchical society means
going under the level of equality."
That sentence says volumes about life in a nonhierarchical society - or, to be more laconic about it, a hierarchical society with one level. As long as service entials subordination, a tendency towards compensatory political privileges in a society of forced equality will emerge, which has the effect of pushing a one-level hierarchical society towards a hierarchical society of more than one level. In the long run, Levelling just creates a new privileged class, grown from within. The positions where self-subordination to the mass is required to do what's expected, by the mass, from the holders of them, is where the new privileged tend to come from.
Published: February 21, 2007 3:36 AM