A blast from the past
'The New Right Enlightenment', nearly four decades on
By University of Missouri Philosophy Professor Andrew Melnyk
I was listening to a recent episode of the IEA’s podcast the other day, and I was surprised – but pleased! – to hear Kristian Niemietz’s mention of an old, and, I had supposed, long-forgotten book to which I contributed as a very young man: The New Right Enlightenment (1985). I was then surprised – and pleased again! – to find myself quoted in Niemietz’s companion essay about it.
Unlike many of the other contributors to that book, I have not gone on to do valuable work in aid of the classical liberal cause, though it remains very dear to me, and I have of late been teaching an unorthodox lower-division undergraduate course in business ethics, framing it as a course in capitalism vs. socialism, and setting James Otteson’s Honorable Business against G.A. Cohen’s Why Not Socialism?. I also assign a segment of Niemietz’s 2019 book Socialism: The Failed Idea That Never Dies.
Regarding the terminology of “Left” and “Right”, I have come to think of its near-universal acceptance as an extraordinarily successful PR coup for the Left (though perhaps unintended). It insinuates into discussion the assumption that there is only one way of being non-Left, so that the huge differences between classical liberals, on the one hand, and throne-and-altar conservatives or blood-and-soil Right-wingers, on the other, are eclipsed. I have taken to speaking of the non-Left, because I (still!) refuse to be classified as Right-wing.
I live in the US, and don’t follow UK political debates very closely, but to the extent that there are parallels with the US, it makes me wonder whether perhaps now might be as good a time as there has been in my lifetime for classical liberal fusion movement. The American Right has fractured into pro-Trump cultists whose political philosophy, such as it is, is interventionism in support of vaguely nationalist goals, and who endorse the full range of anti-capitalist prejudices found on the left, and a Reaganite rump, which may actually be more classically liberal than Reagan was, because it has felt the need to differentiate itself from the nastiest strands in Trumpism.
The American Left, or at least the most committed and vocal of them, have by and large gone all in on wokeism. But there is a rump here too—of American liberals. It has been usual for classical liberals to treat American liberals as grievously ill-named—as not really liberals at all. But I now think that they are liberals—just not (and this is a huge exception and a terrible mistake, of course) in the economic domain. They are liberals because they would all regard the government planning of science, or of culture, or of literature as madness; in these domains, they see the immense value of decentralised decision-making, permissionless innovation, and spontaneous development.
Be all that as it may, I have fond memories of the IEA and its publications, of some lunches and other gatherings there, and even of Arthur Seldon’s editing of my writing—which I found very annoying at the time but which was probably fully justified.
Prof Andrew Melnyk is a Professor of Philosophy at the University of Missouri, Columbia.