Totalitarianism: An Essay In the Philosophy of History

Preface

The present essay will sketch my philosophy of history, with a focus on the concept of totalitarianism. It will be self-consciously broad in scope; it really has to be if I am to present a truly coherent picture. Being merely an outline of my theory, it will have to leave many objections unanswered for the time being. I realize that to some it may seem foolhardy to try to handle so many issues at once; but I stress that this is merely a research program, a related set of hypotheses that may prove to be wrong, but so far seem to me to have remarkable explanatory power.

The Christian Roots of Totalitarianism

Western society's first totalitarian civilization began with medieval Christianity. For the first time, an all-encompassing ideology could be and was forcibly imposed on everyone. Around the same time, most urban centers collapsed or drastically de- populated, leaving the overwhelming majority of the population as serfs, tied to the land for life.1 As Catholic historian Paul Johnson describes early medieval Christian society,

"Men had agreed, or at least had appeared to agree, on an all- enveloping theory of society which not only aligned virtue with law and practice, but allotted to everyone in it precise, Christian- oriented tasks. There need be no arguments or divisions because everyone endorsed the principles on which the system was run. They had to. Membership of the society, and acceptance of its rules, was ensured by baptism, which was compulsory and irrevocable. The unbaptized, that is the Jews, were not members of society at all; their lives were spared but otherwise they had no rights. Those who, in effect, renounced their baptism by infidelity or heresy, were killed. For the remainder, there was total agreement and total commitment. The points on which men argued were slender, compared to the huge areas of complete acquiesence which embraced almost every aspect of their lives."2

Now this form of totalitarianism was peculiar in several ways.

First of all, Christian ideology did not focus on justifying the medieval economic system; it was accepted as a given that most people would be serfs, tied to the land, rather than argued for as the most desirable economic system. The totalitarianism of medieval Christian society therefore existed only partially on principled grounds (in the realm of intellectual, cultural, and personal matters), and partially from sheer inertia (in the economic realm).

Neverthless, the freedom of the individual was virtually non- existent, and the denial of his freedom was in large part an essential doctrine of the reigning ideology. The second oddity was that Christian totalitarianism co-existed with remarkable division of powers. The Church co-existed with the state, sharing power with it, and within Christendom there were many sovereign and semi-sovereign rulers. Still, if we identify totalitarianism by the complete absence of individual freedom coupled with a comprehensive and compulsory ideology, medieval Christian society definitely qualifies.

The Erosion of Catholic Totalitarianism: The Growth of Cities and the Renaissance

Now the division of powers within medieval Christendom proved to be one of its central weaknesses. The first major break with totalitarianism came with the rebirth of cities. Local rulers frequently found it profitable to grant charters to cities which guaranteed certain rights and liberties. Once they arose, these cities spelled the beginning of the end for the medieval economic order. As Henri Pirenne writes, "An increasingly intimate solidarity bound them together, the country attending to the provisioning of the towns, and the towns supplying, in turn, articles of commerce and manufactured goods. The physical life of the burgher depended upon the peasant, but the social ife of the peasant depended upon the burgher. For the burgher disclosed to him a more comfortable sort of existence, a more refined sort, and one which, in arousing his desires, multiplied his needs and raised his standard of living."3

If all power had been monopolized in the hands of a central government, the long-term risks of this policy to the social order might have been recognized. As it was, financial incentives to local rulers overshadowed the long-run social effects. But these were substantial; the cities directly undermined the manorial system by creating new (if illegal) economic opportunities for serfs, and indirectly undermined it by showing that a better, richer, freer way of life was within reach. Again quoting Pirenne, "The first thing which should be considered is the status of the individual as it was when city law was definitely evolved. That status was one of freedom. Every vestige of rural serfdom disappeared within its walls. Whatever might be the differences and even the contrasts which wealth set up between men, all were equal as far as civil status was concerned. 'The air of the city makes free,' says the German proverb (Die Stadtluft macht frei), and this truth held good in every clime."4

But the growth of cities touched chiefly the lack of economic freedom; the first movement towards intellectual and cultural freedom came with the Renaissance. The two were of course closely linked: the Renaissance began in the most advanced cities in Europe, centering in Italy.5 Naturally it could not safely challenge the compulsory ideology of Catholic Christianity directly. Rather it began a two-fold indirect attack. On the one hand, there was a revival of the classical authors; on the other hand, the growth of secular art. Together these made an impressive dent in the ideological monopoly of the Church, and contributed to a new atmosphere of relative tolerance.

The Protestant Reformation's Reaction

Most historians present the Protestant Reformation as somehow the religious corollary of the Renaissance, but even a cursory study of the theology of Luther and Calvin makes this intepretation hard to believe. While the classical revival did indirectly influence the Reformation by stimulating interest in accurate Biblical translation, the central thrust of both Lutheranism and Calvinism was implacable hostility to the emerging tolerant, worldly, humanistic society of the Renaissance. In particular, both Luther and Calvin were adamant opponents of any sort of religious toleration (Luther waited till he attained significant power to adopt this view, while Calvin from the earliest stage of his career argued that, "Because the Papists persecute the truth, should we on that account refrain from repressing error?"6) Against the humanist celebration of man, their theologies emphasized the depths of human depravity. And against the renewed appreciation of reason stemming from the Renaissance, and indeed against the more moderate Catholic position which left some legitimate place for reason, Lutheran and Calvinist theology placed a strong emphasis upon the need for unquestioning faith and the impotence of reason. As with earlier Catholic totalitarianism, the focus of Protestant ideology was not on economic matters, but they were in no way enthusiastic proponents of the growing commercial society.7

Naturally the emergence of two new militant Christian factions led the mainstream Catholic establishment to "reform" itself; but this internal reformation was in many ways a reversion to the totalitarian ways of the past. As Nietzsche puts it, "Luther restored the church: he attacked it."8 The fanatical intolerance of all three factions became evident in the subsequent religious wars and internal persecutions.

The Rise of Liberalism and the Enlightenment

Yet it must be admitted that the indirect effect of the Reformation was the opposite of what its founders intended. For once the European religious monopoly collapsed, the only alternatives were endless war or toleration. Especially in the religiously divided nations, religious toleration began to be adopted, albeit with reluctance. And once toleration existed in the religious realm, it began to spread to philosophy, science, and art. Accepted reluctantly at first, intellectual freedom found ardent and principled defenders among the thinkers who had finally been freed from the demands of religious conformity. To a large extent the earliest principled proponents of toleration centered in Britain, beginning during the upheaveals of the 1640's. Milton was the most famous of these, and later decades added the illustrious names of Locke, Spinoza, and Voltaire.

So we have seen that medieval totalitarianism first broke down on the economic side, and that intellectual freedom had to wait for several additional centuries. But it was the theory of intellectual freedom that matured first, with the theoretical defense of economic freedom trailing behind. The first steps toward a general theory of human freedom came with the radical Whigs, and especially with Locke. While of course there was considerable continuity with the preceding religious traditions of natural law, it was the "true" Whigs who gave natural law a radical intepretation that was deeply subversive of what remained of feudalism. As Locke forthrightly stated his basic theory of human rights, "every Man has a Property in his own Person. This no Body has any right to but himself. The Labour of his Body, and the Work of his hands, we may say, are properly his."9

But as radical as this theory was, it was too vague to constitute a full theory of the most desirable economic system. It was all well and good to proclaim each person's right to his own person and property, but how exactly would a system based on this principle work? Wouldn't it lead to utter chaos? About a century after Locke, the theory of economic freedom took a giant step forward with the work of the Physiocrats and the classical economists. For in the work Quesnay, Adam Smith, David Ricardo, David Hume, Jean-Baptiste Say, and other economists, the workings of a free-market economy based closely upon Lockean rights were explained in rigorous detail. Their central conclusion was that unregulated markets, free international trade, private property, and freedom of labor -- the very economic features that had been slowly emerging in Europe over the previous six or seven hundred years -- were the key to economic prosperity for everyone. And far from being chaotic, the market economy was an intricate and orderly network held together quite well by the price system alone.

The economic theory of laissez-faire and the political theory of tolerance and individual freedom (which together came to be known as classical liberalism) were closely linked to a broader cultural movement, the Enlightenment. Taken together, we can see that the Enlightenment synthesis was for the most part the antithesis of the totalitarian society that it had replaced. Gone were the Christian doctrines, shared by orthodox Catholics and Protestants alike, of the weakness of human reason, the need for faith, human depravity, and compulsory belief. Gone too was the de facto total government management of economic life. In its place arose a strong confidence in human reason and science, optimism, the quest for individual happiness, freedom of thought and discussion, and laissez-faire in economic matters. Of course even the most "enlightened" societies fell short of these ideals, but a full critique and radical alternative to Christian totalitarianism had arrived.10

Rousseau and the Conservative and Socialist Critics of the Enlightenment

Of course not every 18th-century thinker embraced the Enlightenment whole-heartedly. Psychologically speaking, it was very difficult to make a complete break with the past. And it was easy to criticize the Enlightenment on Christian grounds, since it implicitly (and often explicitly) rejected the whole cultural tradition of the preceding centuries. At the same time, there were naturally many thinkers who wanted to build some kind of synthesis between the old values and the new.

The most pivotal figure in this respect was probably Rousseau.

While closely linked personally to other Enlightenment thinkers, even his contemporaries recognized that he was not fully behind their program. And while Rousseau spoke the language of freedom, many of his ideas bore an ominous resemblance to the preceding era of totalitarianism. Each of Rousseau's three most influential works targets one of the bastions of the Enlightenment, offering either a rejection or a synthesis with non-Enlightenment views. Thus, The Discourse on the Arts and Sciences argued that the development of the arts and sciences tends to corrupt morals, offering a dire list of the consequences of the growth of civilization: "No more sincere friendships; no more real esteem; no more well-based confidence.

Suspicions, offenses, fears, coldness, reserve, hate, betrayal will hide constantly under that much vaunted urbanity which we owe to the enlightenment of our century."11 The Discourse on the Origin and Foundations of Inequality argued strongly against the natural right to property, and therefore implicitly against laissez-faire economics. And Rousseau's Social Contract, while maintaining a nominal commitment to freedom, gave it a majoritarian rather than an individualistic slant. As Rousseau expresses the "essence" of his social contract: "Each of us places in common his person and all his power under the supreme direction of the general will; and as one body we all receive each member as an indivisible part of the whole."12 And he does not shrink from the potentially totalitarian implications of this idea: the losing minority to a vote remains bound to it, because "When, therefore, the motion which I opposed carries, it only proves to me that I was mistaken, and that what I believed to be the general will was not so. If my particular opinion had prevailed, I should have done what I was not willing to do, and, consequently, I should not have been in a state of freedom."13 The irreconcilability of this doctrine with Europe's new-found cultural and intellectual freedom is palpable.

Interestingly, scholars still debate whether Rousseau was a socialist or a conservative or something else. Interesting, because in the 19th century two distinct factions opposed to the theory and practice of classical liberalism arose. These were the conservatives and the socialists. Of course these two groups were different from each other in many ways: class background, religious views, attitude towards tradition and established authority. But more important was what they shared: a suspicion or active hostility to either laissez-faire economics, intellectual and cultural freedom, or both.

The socialists' opposition to laissez-faire is well-known; and while there was certainly some disagreement on the issue of intellectual and cultural freedom among socialists, it must be admitted that a very large part of 19th-century socialism regarded these as unjustifiable "bourgeois rights." The orthodox Marxist tradition certainly had little respect for the rights of free expression; and other seminal socialists such as Saint-Simon were explicitly opposed to these sorts of civil liberties.

Less well-known, but very significant, is the fact that 19th- century conservatives had many of the same complaints as the socialists with regards to both economic and personal freedom.

Thus, in his European Socialism, Carl Landauer explains that, "The socially minded Tories believed that the medieval relationship of allegiance between the lord and the men under his manorial jurisdiction, or among the members of a guild had given the lower classes more security and real satisfaction than they could enjoy under the modern economic system in which human beings figure only as buyers and sellers of commodities and labor. The aristocratic guardians of tradition and authority should accept the responsibility for leading the masses in their struggle against the evils of industrialism."14 Similar strains of thought could be found among the German and French aristocracy, for example in Bismark's social programs. And like many socialists, the conservatives had a hard time adjusting to intellectual and cultural freedom, though of course the particular doctrines and practices that they sought to suppress differed.

The key fact is that these conservatives had no sympathy for laissez-faire economics, and on this issue they were in agreement with the socialists. Their alternative economic programs differed, with the conservatives leaning towards a return to feudalism, and the socialists leaning towards a state-managed industrialism. But there was significant overlap: there were medievally-oriented socialists, and especially by the mid-19th-century, there were pro- industrialization conservatives.15

The Triumph of Classical Liberalism and the Return to Totalitarianism

But the conservative and socialist critics of classical liberalism, especially its economic program, met with relatively little practical success in the 19th century. And to summarize one of the few questions on which there is virtually unanimous agreement among economists, classical liberalism fulfilled all of its promises. The standard of living for everyone rose at a fantastic rate throughout the nineteenth century, generally long before any sort of social legislation was passed which could possibly lay claim to a share of the credit.16 The classical economists' claim that free trade and small government promoted peace, while economic nationalism and powerful government promoted war, seemed to be at least partially confirmed by the relative absence of war in the 19th century.

If all this is true, then why did the socialist and conservative movements grow throughout the 19th century? The simplest explanation is that despite all of its achievements, people wanted even more. Conditions for ordinary people prior to the Industrial Revolution were so horrible that even a tremendous magnification of their previous wealth still left them poor in absolute terms. Still, the mere wish for a faster rate of progress hardly supplied convincing evidence that there was any economic system that could deliver more. And yet the conservatives and socialists were convinced that such a system had to exist.

Since the facts gave so little support to their views, it seems likely that the real foundation of the anti-capitalist critique stemmed not from facts, but from underlying values. The basic values of Christian totalitarianism were never fully destroyed by the Enlightenment. The masses and government officials were never won over to classical liberalism, and the intellectuals were won over only briefly. Then came the reaction. It once again became intellectually acceptable to attack the open society, with its values of reason, individualism, and individual freedom. Intellectuals began to develop new, anti-liberal systems of thought.

Some of these intellectuals were direct descendents of Christian totalitarianism -- for the most part, the conservatives.

Others were secular heretics, equally opposed to religious totalitarianism and classical liberalism. Philosopher George Walsh describes this group as "the secular discontents of the modern world," which he defines in the following way: "(1) He holds to Judeo-Christian ethics; (2) He has very largely lost the religious beliefs which would alone give him a metaphysical foundation for these values; (3) Still, he judges and even condemns the modern world for falling short of these values; (4) And finally he concludes that the problem has to be solved by any means other than rejecting the Judeo-Christian ethics."17 They planned out new societies based on secular totalitarian creeds.18 These were the socialists.

Of course, it would be unfair to claim that all of the critics were totalitarians; some of them merely wanted to take what they saw as the best features of liberalism with the best features of either conservatism or socialism. But the trend, away from liberalism and towards a new coercive society, was clear.

By the end of the 19th century, it was clear that classical liberal policies, to the extent that they had been adopted in the first place, were going to be seriously modified with a healthy dose of conservatism or socialism. Initially, the move was chiefly away from laissez-faire economic policies: Germany, France, England, and the United States had all made important concessions to the critics of capitalism by 1900, and the gradual trend was towards a larger economic role for the state. On the sidelines stood the implacable opponents of any compromise with classical liberalism.

It must be admitted that but for some unfortunate historical coincidences, these implacable opponents of liberalism might have stayed permanently marginalized. As it happened, though, war, political unrest, and other factors made it possible for one of the most anti-liberal factions of socialists, the Bolsheviks under Lenin, to seize power in Russia. Then the world saw how modern industry and science could be wedded to totalitarianism to make it more total that it had ever been under Christian totalitarianism. Lenin's Bolsheviks swiftly moved towards a sociey of compulsory belief and total economic planning by the state; and while there were a few periods of liberalization during which other socialist parties were tolerated and some economic decisions were left to the market, within about a decade every vestige of freedom of any kind had been completely destroyed.19 The history and extent of Communist despotism is well-known, so there is no need to elaborate here.

Once the first modern totalitarian state had been established, totalitarians of the socialist variety had a model to point to and emulate. But there was another element that wanted emulate the Bolshevik state, but at the same time attack it and use the fear of Communism as their path to power. The first to do so were the Italian fascists. To some extent, their ideology was was a totalitarian variant of 19th-century conservatism, whose connections to socialism we have already seen. And yet fascism was also to some extent a direct descendent of totalitarian socialism. As democratic socialist historian Carl Landauer puts it, "In a history of socialism, fascism deserves a place not only as the opponent which, for a time, threatened to obliterate the socialist movement. Fascism is connected with socialism by many crosscurrents, and the two movements have some roots in common, especially the dissatisfaction with the capitalist economy of the pre-1918 type."20 Or as Mussolini stated, "It is the State alone that can solve the internal contradictions of capitalism. Where are the shades of Jules Simon, who, at the dawn of liberalism, proclaimed that 'the State must strive to render itself unnecessary and to prepare for its demise,' of the MacCullochs who, in the second half of the last century, affirmed that the State must abstain from too much governing? And faced with the continual, necessary and inevitable interventions of the State in economic affairs what would the Englishman Bentham now say, according to which industry should have asked of the State only to be left in peace? It is true that the second generation of liberal economists was less extremist than the first. But when one says liberalism one says the individual; when one says Fascism, one says the State."21 Fascism of course often aligned with big business, but hardly to promote laissez-faire; as Adam Smith and other classical liberals had observed, businessmen are always eager for the government to protect them from competition and grant them privileges, which was one of their central arguments for drastically restraining government's ability to intervene in business.

After the rise of Italian fascism, both socialist and conservative totalitarians had inspiring models of the sort of society that they wished to bring to the world. And even more liberal societies came to believe that the very existence of such societies offered an argument for more moderate expansions of state power; indeed, the existence of such societies showed that communism or fascism might be in their own future. This belief turned out to be justified in Weimar Germany when another fascist movement, the Nazis under Adolf Hitler, managed to seize power by a combination of electoral and extraparliamentary methods. Again, the Nazi movement drew on both conservative and socialist totalitarianism for its program, as its full name (National Socialist German Workers' Party) starkly suggests. As Carl Landauer explains, "The earlier protagonists of a merger between conservatism and proletarian anticapitalism had been traditionalists. Although this element, too, was present in the minds of the men around the Tat [a conservative, anti-capitalist, but non-Nazi magazine] and in the Strasser wing of the Nazis - as it was, indeed, in the whole Nazi movement - yet the emphasis had shifted, especially in the field of economics: in the creed of Strasser and the Tat groups, there was some affinity to the feudal hostility against the moneyed interest, but there was an even stronger element of Marxism purged of internationalism."22

There were many doctrinal differences between the fascists and Nazis on the one hand and the Communists on the other. In fascism, the Communist emphasis on class struggle was transformed into racial and national struggle. Communists generally claimed that totalitarianism was merely a transition phase, whereas the fascists seemed to conceive of totalitarianism as permanent. Fascism appealed more to the lower-middle class and farmers, and less to the working class than the Communists did. All this and more may be freely conceded, yet the essential similarity of these two forms of totalitarianism, in both origins and practice, is hard to dispute. Perhaps Paul Johnson best sums up the relationship between Communism and fascism when he writes that, "As early as 1923 the Bulgarian peasant regime of Aleksandr Stamboliski, which practiced 'agrarian Communism,' was ousted by a fascist putsch. The Comintern, the new international bureau created by the Soviet government to spread and co-ordinate Communist activities, called on the 'workers of the world' to protest against the 'victorious Bulgarian fascist clique,' thus for the first time recognizing fascism as an international phenomenon. But what exactly was it? There was nothing specific about it in Marx. It had developed too late for Lenin to verbalize it into his march of History. It was unthinkable to recognize it for what it actually was - a Marxist heresy, indeed a modification of the Leninist heresy itself."23

A Few Objections Answered

Here I will briefly counter a few objections, though obviously a great deal more space would be needed to be comprehensive.

a. Does the Bible authorize totalitarianism? There are two replies to this. First of all, it needn't be the case that the Scriptures authorized totalitarianism; it is only necessary that historical Christians assumed that it did and acted accordingly.

Secondly, the textual argument is not that difficult to make: the Old Testament unambiguously embraces a compulsory religion and unlimited cruelty against unbelievers where it is convenient, and the New Testament, though it does not focus on such topics, never repudiates the totalitarianism of the Old Testament. To view Jesus and the early Christians as proto-liberals strikes me as a bizarre interpretation of the Gospels and the Pauline texts.24

b. Was medieval Catholicism really thoroughly totalitarian?

No, of course not. Some measure of freedom of thought existed, but only within carefully regulated boundaries. Several doctrines limiting the power of rulers such as the doctrine of the right of resistance and the theory of natural rights later evolved into important checks upon government power and even a positive program of liberation. But the effect of these doctrines in mitigating the essential totalitarianism of medieval life was minimal.

c. Was the Protestant Reformation thoroughly totalitarian?

Again, of course not. The Protestants were instrumental in developing theories of the right of resistance and the right of revolution (later Protestants, that is; not Luther or Calvin). And as I conceded, the long-run effect of the Reformation was liberating, since it made religious toleration necessary on pragmatic grounds, and thereby paved the way for religious toleration on principle.

d. Doesn't your reading of the radical Whigs and especially Locke downplay the democratic element in their thought in favor of the liberal element? Yes, to some extent. Basically, I see a serious gap in Locke's thought between his doctrine of natural rights and his attempt to reconcile these rights with a social contract that falls short of unanimity. On the other hand, there is little textual evidence for the view that Locke was a proto-welfare liberal (section 42 of the First Treatise seems like a rather slim basis for this interpretation); and there is much textual evidence that even after the establishment of a democratic government he mainly envisioned government as a means for protecting property.

e. Don't you under-estimate the Christian influence upon the Enlightenment? Again, of course there was some continuity between the two traditions, and most of the Enlightenment intellectuals retained some kind of religious belief. But there was a rather extreme break at least with the Christianity of medieval Catholicism, or that of Luther and Calvin. In any case, a central part of my argument is that the Enlightenment never really rid itself of its Christian background, and that this background later returned to haunt it.

f. Doesn't your analysis presuppose the desirability of laissez- faire? Partially; but a large part of my obvious sympathy for laissez-faire stems from the study of history itself. Obviously in so short a space I cannot answer the many objections to laissez-faire economic policy, but my general observation is that laissez-faire correlates with vast economic growth as well as non-economic freedom, whereas government economic activity correlates with lower or even declining economic welfare, and to a lesser but still significant extent with the suppression of non-economic freedoms.

g. Aren't you overlooking important differences between socialists and conservatives in the 19th-century, and Communists and fascists in the 20th-century? I have already admitted a large number of differences, and I don't think that it would seriously alter my general thesis if more differences were found. So long as it is conceded that these groups shared a common rejection of laissez- faire, and a preference for extensive government involvement in economic life, I think I have established an important link between these allegedly disparate movements.

Conclusion

The idea of totalitarianism has deep roots in Western civilization, and therefore great explanatory power. In particular, when we view history as a struggle between the polar opposite ideas of totalitarianism on the one hand and classical liberalism on the other, a large number of seemingly disparate events and ideas cohere neatly with each other: medieval Christianity, the rise of cities, the Renaissance, the Protestant Reformation, liberalism, socialism, conservatism, communism, and fascism all fit logically together.

Now it would be a mistake to try to force every historical detail into an a priori mold, but a sound philosophy of history can avoid this error by appropriately qualifying its conclusions, admitting exceptions, and continuing to search for falsifying as well as confirming evidence.

To briefly comment on the contemporary relevence of my theory of history: the collapse of Communism marks the second death of totalitarianism. The rhetoric of classical liberalism, with its appreciation for both personal and economic freedom, can now be heard from every political faction. Nevertheless, actual government policies in even the most capitalist nations bear far more resemblance to the ideal of moderate socialism than to laissez- faire. Now that the world has repudiated totalitarianism, steeped in anti-capitalist philosophy, the time has come to re-examine whether any aspect whatever of that anti-capitalist philosophy is valid. More fundamentally, the time has come to re-examine the philosophy of the Enlightenment, with its commitment to autonomous reason, a secular outlook, individualism, the pursuit of personal happiness, progress, and individual freedom, and see whether the modern civilization's partial rejection of that philosophy was justified or mistaken.

Notes

1: On de-urbanization after the fall of the Roman Empire, see Henri Pirenne, Medieval Cities: Their Origins and the Revival of Trade (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1925), esp. pp.5-25.

2: Paul Johnson, A History of Christianity (New York:
Atheneum, 1976), pp.191-192.

3: Pirenne, op. cit., p.102.

4: Ibid, p.193.

5: On the connection between the Renaissance and the rise of cities, as well as further information on the liberating aspects of city life, see Quentin Skinner, The Foundations of Modern Political Thought, Vol. 1: The Renaissance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978), esp. pp.3-22.

6: Quoted in George Smith, "Philosophies of Toleration," in Atheism, Ayn Rand, and Other Heresies (Buffalo, NY: Prometheus Books, 1991), p.109.

7: For an interesting case study of Calvinist hostility to early capitalism in the Netherlands, see Simon Schama, The Embarassment of Riches (New York: Alfred Knopf, 1987), pp.323-343. "But even if the Calvinist clergy, as Weber has it, allowed this [the spread of capitalist values] to happen unintentionally, it is certainly not apparent from the tenor of their remarks about the place of money in Christian life. Indeed, there seems to be no real break at all in the uninterrupted flow of polemics against wealth from Flanders to Holland, from Antwerp to Amsterdam. Far from endorsing finance capitalism, the Dutch general synods did their level best to proclaim their disapproval," ibid, pp.329-330.

8: Friedrich Nietzsche, The Antichrist in Walter Kaufman, ed., The Portable Nietzsche (New York: Viking Press, 1954), p.654.

9: John Locke, The Second Treatise of Government, in Peter Laslett, ed., Two Treatises of Government (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1960), pp. 287-288.

10: On the Enlightenment generally, and particularly the influence of Enlightenment ideas upon European monarchs, see John Gagliardo, Enlightened Despotism (Arlington Heights, IL: Harlan Davidson, 1967).

11: Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Discourse on the Arts and Sciences, in Roger and Judith Masters, eds., The First and Second Discourses (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1964), p.38.

12: Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Social Contract, or Principles of Political Right (New York: Hafner Publishing co., 1947), p.15.

13: ibid, p.96.

14: Carl Landauer, European Socialism: A History of Ideas and Movements (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1959), p.22.

15: See ibid, pp.21-71. For more on conservative hostility to laissez-faire, see Frank O'Gorman, British Conservatism (New York: Langman, 1986).

16: See for example T.S. Ashton, The Industrial Revolution: 1760-1830 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1948), or virtually any economic history of the period.

17: From his lecture series "Marxism: Philosophy and Political Ideology."

18: Others, such as Auguste Comte and Enfantin, borrowed from both trends by defining new religious systems.

19: See Landauer, op. cit., pp.701-789, 1183-1242.

20: Ibid, p.873.

21: Benito Mussolini, "The Doctrine of Fascism," in Carl Cohen, Capitalism, Socialism, and Fascism, p.362.

22: Landauer, op. cit., pp.1463.

23: Paul Johnson, Modern Times (New York: Harper & Row, 1983), p.102.

24: A plausible argument could be made that the differences between the Old and New Testaments stem from the fact that the Old Testament was canonized after Judaism was already an established religion, whereas the New Testament was canonized
when Christianity was still a small minority sect.