Invirtiendo en ideas
Un artículo interesante en el WSJ del viernes ... que por fin he podido leer hoy. "Investing in the Right Ideas" de James Piereson.
Lo tenéis aquí con un título matizado: "Investing in conservative ideas".
"Just as the earlier donors had looked to Hayek for guidance, these foundations looked to the neoconservatives. Writers and editors like Irving Kristol, Norman Podhoretz, Hilton Kramer, and Michael Novak had for the most part spent their formative years on the Left. Rather than by Hayek, their ideas had been influenced by George Orwell, Lionel Trilling, and Raymond Aron—intellectuals of Hayek’s generation who had dwelled on the evil of totalitarianism from a moral and political standpoint. Many of them, like Hayek, traced their intellectual lineage back to the 18th-century Whigs, but in so doing they once again emphasized the moral and cultural rather than the economic dimension, typically preferring Adam Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments to his The Wealth of Nations. In brief, they understood the moral foundations of a free society to be prior to and more important than its economic foundations. "
En la Ética de la libertad Rothbard pretende fundamentar una doctrina de la libertad basada en la moral y en los derechos de propiedad. El mismo Hayek, sobre el todo el Hayek de La Fatal Arrogancia o el del último tomo de Derecho, Legislación y Libertad inciden en la cuestión moral de manera contundente (y, eso sí, contrapuesta), por lo que no veo claro el argumento de Piereson para justificar las preferencias de Kristol y cía. Tampoco es importante. Lo que Piereson hace es argumentar/justificar el por qué del distanciamiento manifiesto entre el neoconservadurismo gobernante y el liberalismo que en algunos aspectos aún forma parte de su ideario. Creo yo.
"Like Hayek, the neoconservatives envisioned an important role for intellectuals, but they were not prepared to wait a full generation for their efforts to yield results. It was plain that liberal and left-wing intellectuals had promoted ideas and programs that were wildly out of touch with the operating assumptions of the vast majority of Americans. This opened up an opportunity. The task of conservatism, as Kristol said, was “to show the American people that they are right and the intellectuals are wrong.” Over time, that is more or less what happened.
What the neoconservatives understood was that neither the intellectuals’ dislike for capitalism nor their penchant for socialism was a function of economic analysis. By the mid-1970’s, the economic promise of socialism was dead; it was obvious to everyone that socialist economies could not even feed their own people. What attracted liberal intellectuals to socialism was something else: mainly, the idea of community, which they contrasted invidiously to the individualism and competition of a market society.
Thus, as Kristol and others argued, an effective defense of capitalism required a defense of the cultural assumptions on which a commercial civilization is based. It had to be shown that free societies encouraged values far superior to anything that socialism could deliver. ".
Yo, personalmente, pese a mis lecturas favoritas, me veo más neocon que libertario. Aunque no hacía falta que lo dijera.
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"[e]ffective defense of capitalism required a defense of the cultural assumptions on which a commercial civilization is based".
De sobra está argumentar que los rudimentos de lo que con el tiempo llegaría a ser la Civilización están en el momento en que el primer hombre primitivo ofreció a otro algo a cambio de algo que reconoció de su (del otro) propiedad en lugar de apropiárselo por medio de la fuerza bruta.
La civilización comienza con estos dos hechos: el reconocimiento de la propiedad ajena y el comercio, todo lo demás es periférico o ha venido por añadidura y consecuencia.