Conquering and Subduing by Means of Taxes

When armies subdue a population, they often exact some tax or tribute from the conquered people. This pattern holds throughout history, from Babylon's conquest of various kingdoms in the Ancient Near East, to the Soviet Union's extraction of wealth and technology from eastern European nations after 1945.

The Ottoman Empire provides a good example of this pattern. Like other Islamic kingdoms or caliphates, it was adept at raising revenue from those it oppressed. One of the most famous Ottoman rulers, Suleyman the Magnificent, who ruled from 1520 to 1566, used his military to add vast lands to the Ottoman territory.

One of the few areas able to resist Suleyman's army was Habsburg Vienna. Despite an organized siege in 1529 by the Ottomans, Vienna did not capitulate. It survived a second attack by Suleyman's forces in 1532. But Suleyman was generally successful in his invasions, adding territories from Transylvania to Tripoli to his empire.

Suleyman understood that even more than exacting taxes in the form of money, taking slaves was an effective way, both to enrich his dynasty and to humiliate and weaken those whom he subjugated. The Ottoman monarchy functioned on the basis of slavery. As one textbook (World History: Patterns of Interaction, McDougal-Littell, 2007), notes:

The sultan’s 20,000 personal slaves staffed the palace bureaucracy. The slaves were acquired as part of a policy called devshirme. Under the devshirme system, the sultan’s army drafted boys from the peoples of conquered Christian territories.

Taken from the families, the Muslims "converted them to Islam" and put them to work as slaves for the monarch. Suleyman was also efficient at organizating traditional tax collection in the form of coin. An extra tax, called jizya, was placed on non-Muslims.

The jizya was an excellent tool for subduing "the people of the book," which was a Muslim phrase for Christians and Jews. Not only did caliph have a source of revenue in this tax, but it was a way to ensure that the non-Musilms felt humiliated and "subdued." Further, the Caliph could confiscate as much wealth as was practical from the non-Muslims, because his base of power was among the Muslims. Islamic rulers like Suleyman found justification for their tactic in the Qur'an, which includes this passage:

Fight those who believe not in Allah nor the last day, nor hold that forbidden which hath been forbidden by Allah and His messenger, nor acknowledge the religion of truth, from among the people of the Book, until they pay the Jizya with willing submission, and feel themselves subdued.

A note on orthography: Suleyman is also known as Suleiman, Soliman, and Solyman. The Qur'an is frequently cited as the Koran. The Qur'an was written originally in Arabic, and Suleyman's Ottoman Empire was largely Turkish-speaking. Translation and transliteration yields divergent spellings.

To the east of the Ottoman regions was another Muslim kingdom in India, known as the Mughal Empire. It, too, was expert at extracting wealth from those it oppressed. While the Ottomans tyrannized the Christians, the Mughal Empire persecuted the Hindus and Buddhists.

One of the most famous Mughal emperors, Akbar, was assisted by a Hindu named Todar Mal, who betrayed his own people to serve Akbar. Together Akbar and Todar Mal devised a cruel way to oppress the Hindus: an early form of income tax. As the history textbook notes, Todar Mal confiscated the agricultural products of the peasants:

He levied a tax similar to the present-day U.S. graduated income tax, calculating it as a percentage of the value of the peasants' crops.

This inhumane treatment allowed the Muslims to keep the Hindus and Buddhists of India under a harsh rule for many years. Yet it also bred a resentment among the Indians which would cause them to one day rise up and throw off the yoke of the Islamic oppressors.

One of Akbar's successors was a ruler named Shah Jahan. He extracted more money from the Indians to finance his personal luxuries. He gave the Indians

taxes and more taxes to support the building of monuments, their rulers’ extravagant living, and war.

Conditions for the Indians got even worse. After Shah Jahan, one of his sons named Aurangzeb took power. He was even more cruel to the Hindus and Buddhists. There were many aspects

to Aurangzeb’s oppression of the people. He rigidly enforced Islamic laws, outlawing drinking, gambling, and other activities viewed as vices. He appointed censors to police his subjects’ morals and make sure they prayed at the appointed times.

Intent on humiliating the Indians, he increased

the hated tax on non-Muslims and dismissed Hindus from high positions in his government. He banned the construction of new temples and had Hindu monuments destroyed. Not surprisingly, these actions outraged the Hindus.

Aurangzeb showed the attitudes of Islamic rulers. He expanded his empire by using harsh military force; he taxed the non-Muslims and destroyed their places of worship.

Aurangzeb ruled for almost 50 years and made the empire grow once again with new conquests. However, his rule brought about new problems. A serious Muslim, the new ruler put harsh new laws in place. He punished Hindus and destroyed their temples, which produced a rebellion that managed to take control of part of his empire. At the same time, the Sikhs had become skilled fighters, and they won control of another part of the empire. To fight these battles, Aurangzeb had to increase taxes. Since he only taxed Hindus, not Muslims, this move only made large numbers of people more and more angry.

Note the parallels: when Muslim armies occupied Spain starting in 711 A.D., they destroyed Christian churches and Jewish synagogues. When Muslim armies dominated India, they destroyed Hindu temples and Buddhist temples.

Aurangzeb ruled from 1658 to 1707, and seemed only to get harsher with the passing years. His cruelty paved the way for the fall of his empire.

Aurangzeb levied oppressive taxes to pay for the wars against the increasing numbers of enemies. He had done away with all taxes not authorized by Islamic law, so he doubled the taxes on Hindu merchants. This increased tax burden deepened the Hindus’ bitterness and led to further rebellion. As a result, Aurangzeb needed to raise more money to increase his army. The more territory he conquered, the more desperate his situation became.

During Aurangzeb's reign, first Portuguese and later British trading representatives held influence in the area of the port city Bombay. In fact, the city, now known as Mumbai, was essentially governed by them. The residents of the area enjoyed liberties not found in the bulk of India which was controlled by the Mughals. The Hindus were allowed to practice their religion. Bombay enjoyed economic freedom, as importing and exporting flourished.

From Spain in the west, to India in the East, with the Ottomans between, taxation was an instrument used by oppressors to humiliate and impoverish their subjects.

What Brought Ghana Down?

From around 700 A.D. to around 1000 A.D., the empire of Ghana was a powerful political and economic force in Africa. Trading in gold and salt, Ghana became wealthy. Yet by 1076 A.D., it had become so weak that the Muslims were able to conquer it. What undermined the might of Ghana?

Ghana's downfall was largely economic. The rulers forgot the thing which had made them rich and powerful: a free market in which miners extracted gold from the earth and in which people were free to trade gold and salt at whichever prices seemed reasonable to them. Gold mined from the earth came often in the form of gold dust, and sometimes in large pure nuggets. The kings became greedy, and as one textbook - World History: Patterns of Interaction (McDougal-Littell, 2007) - notes, "the king often demanded these gold nuggets as taxes."

This type of taxation was merely confiscation of private property: in a word, the government was stealing from the people. This reduced the eagerness of the miners to find gold, because they knew that if they found it, the king might simply steal it. Taxation reduces productivity and inventiveness among workers.

In addition to confiscating from the miners, the kings of Ghana began to demand a percentage of products which were bought or sold in Ghana, or which were transported through Ghana:

By the 700s, Ghana was a kingdom, and its rulers were growing rich by taxing the goods that traders carried through their territory.

The rulers were growing rich, but the people were growing poor: taxation is theft. Productive business activity, the kind that creates jobs and gives ordinary people a chance to gain wealth, was inhibited. Who would want to do business in an environment in which the government taxed, confiscated, and monitored transactions?

Merchants met in trading cities, where they exchanged goods under the watchful eye of the king's tax collector.

The marketplace was no longer free. The government distorted the natural equations of commerce. Normally, buyers and sellers negotiate and finally agree on some price. The government's actions, however, manipulated the give-and-take of the marketplace.

In his royal palace, the king stored gold nuggets and slabs of salt (collected as taxes). Only the king had the right to own gold nuggets, although gold dust freely circulated in the marketplace. By this means, the king limited the supply of gold.

By limiting the supply, the king manipulated the price. The 'natural price' of something is the price to which buyer and seller freely agree. When the government manipulates the supply by limiting it, prices are forced unnaturally upward. Although this action increased the king's power and wealth, it weakened Ghana.

By the time the Muslims attacked Ghana, its abilities to defend itself were diminished because of a sluggish economy. Taxes and the lack of a free market brought Ghana down.

Ghana was not the only power on the continent to be undermined by government interference in the economy. The empire of Songhai established a tax-gathering bureaucracy under the rule of Askia Muhammad. His taxmen were so efficient that Songhai fell behind in terms of technological development. When Muslims from Arabia and Morocco attacked (despite that fact that Songhai was a Muslim empire), the attackers had gunpowder, while the defenders of Songhai did not, and Songhai soon fell. Taxes had reduced both the will of the people innovate and the ability of the people to acquire new technology.

Likewise was the case of the powerful city-state Great Zimbabwe. Shortly after the year 1000 A.D., it was the major economic power in Southern Africa. But its leaders taxed the trade in the area, and by 1450, the city was a collection of abandoned ruins.

The pattern is clear. The twin evils of taxation and regulation will weaken a nation. In order to thrive, a healthy economy must allow buying and selling to be the product of free negotiations between customers and suppliers. Any interference, regulation, or taxation by the government will harm the process.

To be sure, taxes are necessary. But they must always be kept at a minimum, and the government must not be allowed to stipulate what that minimum is. Whatever the government may propose as a minimum, the real minimum will always be lower. As Senator Goldwater wrote:

But having said that each man has an inalienable right to his property, it also must be said that every citizen has an obligation to contribute his fair share to the legitimate functions of government. Government, in other words, has some claim on our wealth, and the problem is to define that claim in a way that gives due consideration to the property rights of the individual.

Whichever projects and tasks the government envisions for itself, the citizens must be ready to resist. The "legitimate functions" of the government are few, but the ambition of government is large. A very small amount of taxation will fund the things which a government must do. The distinction is between what the government must do and what it wants to do. The government's desire to enact its will is the source of poverty for the people and weakness for the nation.

Taxation Finances Monarchies

In the year 910 A.D., a monastery was founded in the town of Cluny in France. This monastery would come to be associated with a reform movement which aimed to return the church to its tasks of helping the poor, educating the common people, and offering spiritual wisdom. This movement had a significant effect. Monasteries increased their efforts at dispensing food and clothing to anyone who needed them, literacy rates rose, and the church's message that God cares for and about people replaced superstitious traditions about needing to earn God's favor.

The reform movement also had a political side. Its goal was to protect the church from exploitation by worldly-minded monarchs who sought to use the church for political instead of spiritual goals. Specifically, some monarchs had adopted the practice of appointing whomever they chose to offices within the church. Instead of spiritually-minded women and men whose purposes were to help the poor and educate them, friends of the royal family, who had neither the desire nor the ability to make a positive impact in society, were appointed to church jobs. The Cluny movement worked to put this trend, called lay investiture, to an end. A similar practice, called simony, involved the selling of church jobs; the Cluny movement was likewise opposed to simony.

Along with the intentions of the Cluny movement, its funding was also important. While monarchies had only one source of funding, taxation, the church had several. First, monasteries were often self-supporting; on their own land, they grew crops and raised animals; they made cloth and candles and other necessities. Some monasteries even generated a surplus, selling the excess produce, and using the money to fund their work among the poor. Second, both rich people and poor people made large and small donations to the church; some gave money, others gave land, and others gave materials like lumber or flour.

While it is true that some monarchs arranged for a fraction of tax revenues to go to the church, many history books overemphasize this aspect of church funding. The fact that the church had other sources of funding, sources which were independent of the monarch, gave the church the ability, in some situations, to take a principled stand and oppose the monarch. The word 'tithe' means 'tenth' and was the traditional donation to the church - one gave a tenth of one's annual income. One history textbook - World History: Patterns of Interaction (McDougal-Littell, 2007) - notes:

The Church used some of the money to perform social services such as caring for the sick and the poor. In fact, the Church operated most hospitals in medieval Europe.

Economic developments over the course of the Middle Ages affected incomes for the monarchs. Manufacturing, importing, and exporting expanded, and royal tax revenue increased accordingly, because it was then, and is now, calculated as a percentage of income. At first, then, the merchants' taxes increased the king's power and wealth. The new merchant class, however, did not want to endure the royal taxes, and worked to find a way to retain their freedom. The narrative of resistance to taxation is the narrative of the fight for freedom.

The merchants and craftspeople of medieval towns did not fit into the traditional medieval social order of noble, clergy, and peasant. At first, towns came under the authority of feudal lords, who used their authority to levy fees, taxes, and rents. As trade expanded, the burghers, or merchant-class town dwellers, resented this interference in their trade and commerce. They organized themselves and demanded privileges. These included freedom from certain kinds of tolls and the right to govern the town. At times they fought against their landlords and won these rights by force.

As merchants found ways to free themselves from taxes and tolls, a new kind of civil freedom was born. This type of civil freedom would stabilize itself in written forms of government: constitutions which would limit the power of government and thereby protect the freedom of the individual. This would be the case in England, where King John had made himself unloved among his people.

Some of John’s problems stemmed from his own personality. He was cruel to his subjects and tried to squeeze money out of them. He alienated the Church and threatened to take away town charters guaranteeing self-government. John raised taxes to an all-time high.

Not only was John harassing the people by means of taxes, but he was interfering in the church by appointing his friends to posts, he was damaging the freedom of individuals by arranging or forbidding marriages, and harming the freedom of town by dictating to them how they should arrange their own matters inside the town. The English people had enough of such misery, and took matters into their own hands.

His nobles revolted. On June 15, 1215, they forced John to agree to the most celebrated document in English history, the Magna Carta (Great Charter). This document, drawn up by English nobles and reluctantly approved by King John, guaranteed certain basic political rights. The nobles wanted to safeguard their own feudal rights and limit the king’s powers. In later years, however, English people of all classes argued that certain clauses in the Magna Carta applied to every citizen. Guaranteed rights included no taxation without representation, a jury trial, and the protection of the law. The Magna Carta guaranteed what are now considered basic legal rights both in England and in the United States.

The Magna Carta was a foundational document, setting a precedent that in order to protect the people's liberty, the government's power must be kept to a minimum. The group of nobles had the power to approve or reject any proposed tax from King John. Over the years, this group of nobles gradually redesigned itself into the Parliament. By 1295, when King Edward I was on the throne, the Parliament began to include not only aristocracy, but also the commoners. Thus the aristocrats were able to check the king, and commoners were able to nudge the aristocrats into more vigilantly working against any potential tax. In 1295, the parliament included not only the nobles and top church officials, but knights and burgesses. Burgesses are not from the aristocracy or royal family; they are commoners. When the king proposed a tax, he called two burgesses

from every borough and two knights from every county to serve as a parliament, or legislative group. In November 1295, knights, burgesses, bishops, and lords met together at Westminster in London. This is now called the Model Parliament because its new makeup (commoners, or non-nobles, as well as lords) served as a model for later kings.

The success or failure of the Parliament depended upon the members, noble or common, remaining vigilant and steadfast against taxes. The king would certainly try to tempt them, through personal favors or political pressure, to allow taxation.

Over the next century, from 1300 to 1400, the king called the knights and burgesses whenever a new tax was needed. In Parliament, these two groups gradually formed an assembly of their own called the House of Commons. Nobles and bishops met separately as the House of Lords. Under Edward I, Parliament was in part a royal tool that weakened the great lords. As time went by, Parliament became strong. Like the Magna Carta, it provided a check on royal power.

By acting as a restraint on taxation, the Parliament made England a model for those future nations, including the United States, which hoped to maintain freedom. In France, however, things did not go so well for the idea of liberty. On a large historical scale, France was sinking into absolutism, a form of government in which there were no checks whatsoever on the king's power to tax. This would cause limitless misery, and eventually erupt in the savage but futile French Revolution. Philip II, king of France, subjected his subjects to the worst possible treatment: high taxes.

Philip II not only wanted more land, he also wanted a stronger central government. He established royal officials called bailiffs. They were sent from Paris to every district in the kingdom to preside over the king’s courts and to collect the king’s taxes.

Taxes are fueled by two different types of greed: the personal greed of a monarch for luxury, and the institutional greed of a monarch or president for power. As the old proverb says, money is power, and those monarchs who desired great power achieved it, or tried to, by massive taxation. The human cost involved is nearly incalculable, given that taxation ripples through society, harming education and culture, forcing people into bitter poverty, and taking away hopes for the society's future.

One of Philip II's successors, Philip IV, knew that taxation was power, and in order for the king to have all the power, and for the people to lose all their freedom, no exceptions could be tolerated to the king's power to tax.

In 1302, Philip IV, who ruled France from 1285 to 1314, was involved in a quarrel with the pope. The pope refused to allow priests to pay taxes to the king. Philip disputed the right of the pope to control Church affairs in his kingdom.

Philip IV was willing to use a legislative body which looked like a Parliament, something called the Estates-General, to strengthen his case for taxing everyone, even the priests. But in reality,

the Estates-General never became an independent force that limited the king’s power.

Through this unlimited taxation, France slid down into absolutism, and the French people suffered the loss of much of their freedom. The United States, in its origin and development, followed more after the British model than the French model, and developed a governmental structure which had the purpose of maximizing and protecting personal freedom and individual liberty. Great strides were made as slavery was abolished and women were given legal and political equality. But even in the United States, freedom was lost as Sixteenth Amendment enabled income tax, and the IRS inflicted merciless harm to almost all citizens. As Senator Goldwater wrote:

Government does not have an unlimited claim on the earnings of individuals. One of the foremost precepts of the natural law is man's right to the possession and the use of his property. And a man's earnings are his property as much as his land and the house in which he lives. Indeed, in the industrial age, earnings are probably the most prevalent form of property. It has been the fashion in recent years to disparage “property rights,” to associate them with greed and materialism. This attack on property rights is actually an attack on freedom. It is another failure to take into account the whole man. How can a man be truly free if he is denied the means to exercise freedom? How can he be free if the fruits of his labor are not his to dispose of, but are treated, instead, as part of a common pool of public wealth? Property and freedom are inseparable: to the extent government takes the one in the form of taxes, it intrudes on the other.

The statement "private property and freedom are inseparable" is often attributed to George Washington, but evidence for that attribution is not strong. Senator Goldwater writes something quite similar above. The linkage between property and freedom is important: they may seem to be two different issues, but they are closely related. Freedom of the press, freedom of association, freedom of belief, freedom of assembly, freedom of speech, and freedom of religion are neither possible nor meaningful without private property rights. Because property rights are essential to all those forms of freedom, taxation, which is an attack upon property, is an attack upon freedom.

Taxes: Instruments of Oppression

While there are a few things worse than taxation - famines, plagues, and wars - it is still true that taxes are one of the worst things which a government can inflict upon its own people. When a government levies taxes - when a government steals from its own people - it not only denies them the earned fruit of their own labor, but it denies them the material means by which they can exercise their freedom.

To be sure, humanity is often tempted to value material possessions too much, and value the life of the heart and mind too little. But opposition to taxation is not mere crass materialism. Rather, by opposing taxation, one manifests an understanding of the fact that material goods, used freely by their rightful possessors, are the means to expressing the life of the heart and to expressing the life of the mind. To deprive a citizen of his property is to deprive a citizen of his freedom. Yet the government, the very purpose of which is to protect a citizen's life, property, and freedom, is guilty of denying the citizen his freedom when it divests him of his property.

Concrete examples show us that taxation is one utensil in the portfolio of oppression. Whether labeled as "tributes" or "user fees," governments use taxes to subjugate populations. Around 1240 A.D., the Mongols invaded and occupied southern Russia. As one textbook, World History: Patterns of Interaction (McDougal-Littell, 2007), describes it,

The Mongols demanded just two things from the Russians: absolute obedience and massive amounts of tribute, or payments. By and large, the Russian nobles agreed. Novgorod's prince and military hero Alexander Nevsky, for example, advised his fellow princes to cooperate with the Mongols. The Russian nobles often crushed revolts against the Mongols and collected oppressive taxes for the foreign rulers.

Oppressors usually find willing helpers - those who will harm their fellow countrymen in return for a sycophantic chance to gain favors from the tyrants. Whether Russian nobles willing to harm their fellow citizens, or bureaucrats working for the IRS, governments require and develop apparatuses - sometimes sophisticated ones - for collecting taxes. Perhaps one of the most notorious such systems was the "tax farming" system used in parts of the Roman Empire.

People generally despise tax collection agencies of all variations. Those Russian aristocrats who aided the Mongols did so by ruining their reputation among their fellow Russians:

During the 1320's, Moscow's Prince Ivan I had earned the gratitude of the Mongols by helping to crush a Russian revolt against Mongol rule. For his services, the Mongols appointed Ivan I as tax collector of all the Slavic lands they had conquered. They also gave him the title of "Grand Prince." Ivan had now become without any doubt the most powerful of all Russian princes. He also became the wealthiest and was known as "Ivan Moneybag."

The situation of the Mongols in Russia is one among many examples of the tension between the legitimate need for a government to have some small source of funds for its legitimate activities on the one hand and its illegitimate tendency to expand its revenues and activities beyond the practical minimum. How can a society allow its government to levy some small tax, and yet ensure that the government's greed does not cause it to tax more than the least feasible amount? This question, in varied forms, arises for every civilization. The ability to answer this question is the key to that civilization's survival. Senator Goldwater writes:

We all have heard much throughout our lifetimes, and seen little happen, on the subject of high taxes. Where is the politician who has not promised his constituents a fight to the death for lower taxes — and who has not proceeded to vote for the very spending projects that make tax cuts impossible? There are some the shoe does not fit, but I am afraid not many. Talk of tax reduction has thus come to have a hollow ring. The people listen, but do not believe. And worse: as the public grows more and more cynical, the politician feels less and less compelled to take his promises seriously.

The senator goes on to distinguish between the false notion that a government has an "unlimited claim" to the property and income of its citizens and the plausibly true proposition that a government might have some limited claims on its citizens. Given the reality of the world as it is - imperfect - and the reality of human nature as it is - also imperfect - we must acknowledge that government is, in the words of Thomas Paine, a necessary evil. If government is necessary and the world imperfect, then taxes will also be necessary. Although necessary, they must be strictly limited and held to the lowest conceivable minimum.

We have been led to look upon taxation as merely a problem of public financing: How much money does the government need? We have been led to discount, and often to forget altogether, the bearing of taxation on the problem of individual freedom. We have been persuaded that the government has an unlimited claim on the wealth of the people, and that the only pertinent question is what portion of its claim the government should exercise. The American taxpayer, I think, has lost confidence in his claim to his money. He has been handicapped in resisting high taxes by the feeling that he is, in the nature of things, obliged to accommodate whatever need for his wealth the government chooses to assert.

When the government confiscates people's money and property, it also reduces their freedom. Whether in Mongol-dominated Russia or in twenty-first century America, resistance to taxation is a defense of freedom. From the Magna Carta to the English Bill of Rights of 1689, from the First Continental Congress to the Second Continental Congress, thinkers who have coherently advocated liberty have, as a corollary, consistently sought lower taxes.

Islam and Taxes

The religion of Islam appeared around 630 A.D., and a century later, its armies had occupied much of North Africa, Spain, Arabia, and other parts of the Near East. To finance these military actions, and the occupational governments which ruled over the populations of the conquered lands, Islam needed to raise funds. It did so through plunder and booty, confiscating valuables in the lands it invaded, but also through taxation.

Shortly after Muhammad died in 632 A.D., and shortly after Abu-Bakr became his successor, the central role of taxation in Islam emerged. Some Muslims who had followed Muhammad did not want Abu-Bakr as the next Islamic leader. According to World History: Patterns of Interaction, they

refused to pay taxes, and a few individuals even declared themselves prophets. For the sake of Islam, Abu-Bakr invoked jihad. The word jihad means "striving" and can refer to the inner struggle against evil. However, the word is also used in the Qur'an to mean an armed struggle against unbelievers. For the next two years, Abu-Bakr applied this meaning of jihad to encourage and justify the expansion of Islam.

Already in a very early stage of Islam's development, taxation is a major issue, and it is linked to jihad - linked to the military expansion of Islam. It is important to remember that the word jihad probably did once refer to an inner psychological or spiritual struggle against evil, and may even still occasionally be used that way. Note also that this first major Islamic tax controversy was not related to the taxation of the oppressed peoples in the lands conquered by Islam, but rather related to the taxation of Muslims by their leaders.

As Muslim armies conquered and occupied vast territories in Spain, North Africa, Arabia, Mesopotamia, and Persia, those subjected to Islamic military government would also face taxation. Those in such territories were taxed according to their religious status. If they converted to Islam, they would pay a lower tax rate. Those who chose to remain with their own culture's native religions were treated more harshly: "They paid a poll tax each year" which might be in coin, in agricultural goods, or in the form of having one's children confiscated to be slaves or laborers.

Starting around 750 A.D., the Caliphate - the Islamic empire - fell under the control of a dynasty called the Abbasids. One of their goals was to conquer and occupy Gaul - what we now know as France. The first attempted Islamic invasion of France was in 732 A.D., but this attempt had failed. The Abbasids would try again. This effort would require a large imperial military, and lots of money - money to be gained by taxation.

The Abbasids developed a strong bureaucracy to conduct the huge empire's affairs. A treasury kept track of the money flow. A special department managed the business of the army.

The Abbasids would fund their military buildup with taxes that disproportionately burdened the residents of lands occupied by Islamic armies, and of those residents, the taxes would disproportionately burden the non-Muslims, who conveniently lacked any political influence whatsoever. These non-Muslims were also, on average, poorer than the Muslims in their regions: poorer both than the locals who had converted to Islam, and than the occupying Islamic soldiers who were foreign to the region.

To support this bureaucracy, the Abbasids taxed the land, imports and exports, and non-Muslims' wealth.

But not all taxes collected were for military expansions. Some went to support the luxurious style of a the Caliphs - the leaders of the empire. Some went to support the mosques and the religious leaders - mullahs and imams. Some of it was collected for the purposes of helping the poor.

India and China: Learning about Taxation from History

Between roughly 400 B.C. and 550 A.D., a series of major empires established themselves in India and China. Their tax policies partially determined their durations and ultimate declines. Imperial governments which levied more than the lowest practical amounts of tax were often overthrown.

For example, the Indian emperor Chandragupta Maurya, who ruled from approximately 321 B.C. to approximately 297 B.C., financed a lavish lifestyle for himself. To the east of India, Seleucus ruled an area which had been part of the empire of Alexander the Great; Seleucus sent an ambassador named Megasthenes to visit Chandragupta Maurya. Megasthenes wrote a famous account about the wealth of India's emperor, including descriptions of the amount of gold used in the emperor's palace.

To pay for his personal wealth, as well as to fund his military, Chandragupta Maurya stole from the people of India. According to World History: Patterns of Interaction (McDougal-Littell, 2007),

He divided the empire into four provinces, each headed by a royal prince. Each province was then divided into local districts, whose officials assessed taxes and enforced the law.

Taxes were not always paid in coin (paper money had not yet come into common use). Sometimes the government required taxes to be paid in the form of labor: either as a solider or as a worker building a magnificent structure for the emperor. Chandragupta Maurya stole huge amounts of money, as well as agricultural produce, from the people:

The government levied high taxes. For example, farmers had to pay up to one-half the value of their crops to the king.

Chandragupta Maurya started an era known as the Mauryan Empire. A later phase of Indian history, from approximately 320 A.D. to 535 A.D., is the Gupta Empire. The people likewise suffered because of harsh taxation. Amazingly,

There was a tax on water, and every month, people had to give a day's worth of labor to maintain

the emperor's projects. The ruler stole from the people. When taxes exceed the smallest practical amount, they are theft.

As in Mauryan times, farmers owed a large part of their earnings to the king.

Two principles emerge from the details of these empires. First, taxation is necessary; for common military defense and to maintain a legal system. Second, if taxes exceed the lowest practical amount, they inflict misery on people; this is true even if the taxes are instituted in order to fund some activity which is well-intended and designed to benefit the people. Both the Mauryan Empire and the Gupta Empire fell, in part, because of the people's anger about taxes. In China, the Qin Dynasty fell after the death of emperor Shi Huangdi.

Rumblings of discontent during the Qin Dynasty grew to roars in the years after Shi Huangdi's death. Peasants were bitter over years of high taxes.

The common people resented the "harsh labor quotas" and other methods devised by the government to steal from the people. Invariably, government officials, who have much wealth already, work to take even more from the common people, who have less. The Chinese rebelled against the Qin Dynasty because of its taxes. One of the rebel leaders was Liu Bang. He later ruled from 202 B.C. to 195 B.C. and became known as Emperor Gao.

To win popular support, Liu Bang departed from Shi Huangdi's strict legalism. He lowered taxes.

Throughout history, rebellions have often been organized because of taxes. People find taxes to be politically intolerable. From Rehoboam in the Ancient Near East, to King George III in 1776, the worst governments and the most cruel tyrants are those who tax. Revolution is the people's desire for freedom, and taxation is the enemy of freedom.

Sadly, Liu Bang's successors did not maintain his policies. The Han Dynasty, which replaced the Qin Dynasty, slowly drifted back into the habit of raising taxes instead of lowering them.

The Chinese emperor relied on a complex bureaucracy to help him rule. Running the bureaucracy and maintaining the imperial army were expensive. To raise money, the government levied taxes. Like the farmers in India, Chinese peasants owed part of their yearly crops to the government. Merchants also paid taxes.

Again the bureaucrats, who have more, find ways to steal from the common people, who have less. Leaders like Liu Bang, who can resist the temptation to take money from the people, are rare in history. In China, the Han Dynasty was not content with stealing money from the ordinary people.

Besides taxes, the peasants owed the government a month's worth of labor or military service every year. With this source of labor, the Han emperors built

some useful things, like roads and the additions to the Great Wall, but also many personal luxuries and palaces for the Dynasty. Even when the taxes and forced labor were used in projects for the common good, like roads, the money was used wastefully and inefficiently. When government officials obtain funds for a specific project, like building a road, they ask for, and receive, more money than the project actually costs. The extra money they use to buy luxuries for themselves or to hire friends - even if there is no work for the friends to do.

The attitudes of Liu Bang lived on. There naturally arises, among any people oppressed by taxation, the desire for liberty. Ban Gu and Ban Zhao, two ancient writers who recorded the history of the Han Dynasty while it was happening, are cited in World History: Patterns of Interaction as they comment on the need to free people from taxation:

Agriculture is the foundation of the world. No duty is greater. Now if [anyone] personally follows this pursuit diligently, he has yet [to pay] the impositions of the land tax and tax on produce ... Let there be abolished the land tax and the tax on produce levied upon the cultivated fields.

Ban Gu and Ban Zhao are pointing out that a farmer, who is already doing a very difficult job, should not have, on top that, to pay taxes. They are demanding the abolishment of two particular taxes, and a reduction in taxation as a whole.

In sum, throughout history, taxes are and have been the tools of oppression. A government's taxes can never be too low; they are usually too high. Rulers are very creative in finding excuses to take money from their people. The government may claim that it is doing work which will benefit the people, or it may warn that if it doesn't take the people's money, it will go into debt - or further into debt. Both arguments are specious: projects done for the common good can often be done better by other social institutions and not by the government; debt can be reduced or avoided when the government simply spends less. Few things are more harmful to the human race than taxes.

Saving Lives in Poland

Across Europe, during WWII, brave and creative people invented a variety of ways to hide Jews from the Nazis, or to smuggle them to safe regions. Amazing events took place as secret operations hid or transported the Jews inside Nazi-controlled areas.

In Germany, for example, ecumenical networks organized the rescue of Jews - the word 'ecumenical' reflecting the fact that Lutherans and Roman Catholics were willing to set aside their differences in order to oppose the Nazis and save as many Jewish lives as possible.

In Poland, however, the situation was different. Poland was, at the outbreak of the war, approximately 95% Roman Catholic and 5% Jewish (exact numbers vary). There was no need for an ecumenical spirit: the Polish underground was seamlessly Roman Catholic. Among the many tales of heroism emerging from wartime Poland is the narrative of a zoo in Warsaw which was used to hide Jews from the Nazis. Historian Diane Ackerman writes:

Jan and Antonina Zabinski were Christian zookeepers horrified by Nazi racism, who capitalized on the Nazis' obsession with rare animals in order to save over three hundred doomed people. Their story has fallen between the seams of history, as radically compassionate acts sometimes do. But in wartime Poland, when even handing thirsty Jew a cup of water was punishable by death, their heroism stands out as all the more startling.

The occupation of Warsaw (and the rest of Poland) was a long affair. Nazis had occupied the city since October 1939. The Nazis would leave in January 1945, as the Soviet Army began its occupation of the city. After more than five years of Nazi oppression, the city of Warsaw would then be subjected to Stalinist oppression. The Nazi occupation was, of course, explicitly anti-Semitic, pursuing its objective of killing as many Jews as possible.

Unlike other occupied countries, where hiding Jews could land you in prison, in Poland harboring a Jew was punishable by immediate death to the rescuer and also to the rescuer's family and neighbors, in a death-frenzy deemed "collective responsibility." Nonetheless, many hospital workers disguised adult Jews as nurses, drugged small children to quiet them before smuggling them out in knapsacks, and planted people in funeral carts under a heap of corpses. Many Christian Poles hid Jewish friends for the whole length of the war, even though it meant reduced rations and relentless vigilance and ingenuity. Any extra food entering the house, unfamiliar silhouettes, or whispers seeping from a cellar or closet might inspire a visiting neighbor to notify the police or tip off the city's underbelly of blackmailers. The wayfarers often spent years in the dark, barely able to move, and when they finally emerged, unfolding their limbs, their weak muscles failed and they needed to be carried like a ventriloquist's dummies.

As the brave citizens of Warsaw continued to preserve the group of Jews hidden in the zoo, the war progressed. The Soviet army was advancing toward Warsaw from the east; the Poles anticipated that the Russians would liberate them from the Nazis. At the same time in 1944, thousands of Polish soldiers, organized as the Home Army, were preparing to stage a massive resistance action, later known as the Warsaw Uprising. This action was to be timed to coincide with the Soviet army's approach to the city. This would have confronted the Nazis simultaneously both with the Soviet attack and with the internal uprising - hastening the liberation of the city. "On July 27, when Russian troops reached the Vistula sixty-five miles south of Warsaw," Ackerman writes that the Nazi

Governor Hans Frank summoned 100,000 Polish men between the ages of seventeen and sixty-five to work nine hours a day building fortifications around the city, or be shot. The Home Army urged everyone to ignore Frank's order and start preparing for battle, a call to arms echoed the next day by the Russians, pushing closer, who broadcast in Polish: "The hour for action has arrived!" By August 3, as the Red Army bivouacked ten miles from the right-bank district that included the zoo, life grew even tenser.

The anticipation was agonizing,

and people kept asking: "When will the Uprising start?"

On August 1, 1944, the Uprising began. The Home Army anticipated that the Soviet soldiers, camped only a few miles away, would attack the Nazi occupational troops at the same time, and make quick work of liberating Warsaw. Instead, the Russians did nothing. Without Soviet support, the Polish resistance was facing the Nazis alone, a difficult or even impossible assignment. Historian Michael Korda places the Warsaw Uprising in the larger context of the European Theater of WWII:

In the east, of course, a war on an even larger scale was taking place - the front line ran from Memel on the Baltic to the Danube in Bulgaria, with a huge, threatening bulge developing in the south, where the army groups of Marshals Malinovsky and Tolbukhin were advancing swiftly to take Belgrade, surround Budapest, and approach within fifty miles of the German-Hungarian border. In the north, fanatical German resistance had stalled the Russians in East Prussia; but in the center the Russians at last held Warsaw. The Russians had paused for two months in sight of Warsaw to allow the Germans to savagely put down an uprising led by the Polish government in exile - which was based in London - so that Stalin could replace the so-called London Poles with his own communist Poles: one of the darkest and most cynical chapters in a war of stygian darkness.

Stalin was willing to let the Home Army die, man by man, at the hands of the Nazis. Once the Polish resistance had been exterminated, the Soviet army would then occupy Warsaw - not liberate it. Once the Poles knew that their defeat was certain, soldiers of the Home Army began to escape from the neighborhoods surrounded by Nazis. They eluded the Nazis by sneaking out through the underground sewer system. Diane Ackerman writes:

By September, 5,000 soldiers in the old town had escaped through the sewers, despite Germans dropping grenades and burning gasoline down the manholes. Elsewhere, the Allies were advancing on all fronts: after liberating France and Belgium, the United States and Britain were pushing into Germany from the Netherlands, Rhineland, and Alsace; and though the Red Army paused near Warsaw, it had already captured Bulgaria and Romania, was prepared to take Belgrade and Budapest, and planned to storm the Reich from the Baltics; the United States had landed on Okinawa and was pounding the South Pacific.

The war seemed to be progressing toward its end in every place except Warsaw. The Uprising continued, with no help from the Soviets and therefore no prospect of success. Yet the Poles fought fiercely and the Nazis found that they could not easily quash the Uprising. Soon negotiations between the leaders of the Home Army and the Nazi officers took place, trying to find terms of a ceasefire. On October 2, 1944, the Home Army surrendered, and Warsaw was once again occupied by the Nazis.

Although the two months of the Uprising were over, life was still very tense for the residents of Warsaw who were hiding and supporting Jews. For three agonizing months, they lived with the knowledge that the Soviet army was camped only a few miles away and yet refusing to drive the Nazis out of Warsaw. Every day was a risk; if the occupying Nazis discovered that a Roman Catholic Pole was helping a Jew, both would be executed. Finally, however, the Soviet army took action, having waited so long to allow the Nazis to eliminate more Poles, and to allow the Poles to eliminate more Nazis. Diane Ackerman writes:

The Red Army finally entered Warsaw on January 17, long after the city's surrender and too late to help. In theory, the Russians were supposed to drive out the Germans, but for political, strategic, and practical reasons (among them, losing 123,000 men en route), they had camped on the east side of the Vistula River and complacently watched the bloodshed for two months solid, as thousands of Poles were massacred, thousands more sent to camps, and the city extinguished.

The relief was minimal: Warsaw did not erupt in joy and celebration. By the time the Nazis left, the horror had been too great and gone on too long to allow for festivities. When the Soviets took over, it soon became clear that their use of the word 'liberation' was insincere indeed. The Soviet communists subjected Poland to a dictatorship that was, if somewhat less anti-Semitic, nearly as harsh as the Nazis had been.

Nonetheless, the bravery of Poland's Roman Catholics saved thousands of Jews. The courage of these Poles has been acknowledged and honored worldwide.

Thatcher's Place in History

By early 1979, the citizens of England were suffering as the consequence of years, and even decades, of economic policies which had ruined the formerly healthy British economy. After WWII, the English government began to nationalize many businesses. Ordinary citizens were no longer allowed to be partial owners of these businesses; rather, the government taxed citizens, took their money, and used that money to purchase the businesses so that the government owned them. Instead of several thousand people each owning a small share of a steel or coal company, the government owned the entire company by itself.

As the sole owner, the government controlled the company’s activities. When ordinary citizens own a company together, they are inclined to adjust the company’s activities based on changes in the economic climate. But when the government owns and controls a company, it does not have to respond to economic conditions. Government ownership means that a business will make its decisions without regard to realities like the price of energy or interest rates. As the British government owned more and more industries, its decision-making was more and more removed from reality.

When the government’s poor management of these companies caused them to lose money, instead of making money, the government simply taxed the citizens and took more money from them to make up the difference. Historian William Duiker writes:

The establishment of the British welfare state began with the nationalization of the Bank of England, the coal and steel industries, public transportation, and public utilities such as electricity and gas. In the area of social welfare, the new government enacted the National Insurance Act and the National Health Service Act, both in 1946. The insurance act established a comprehensive social security program and nationalized medical insurance, thereby enabling the state to subsidize the unemployed, the sick, and aged. The health act created a system of socialized medicine that forced doctors and dentists to work with state hospitals, although private practices could be maintained. This measure was especially costly for the state, but within a few years, 90 percent of the medical profession was participating. The British welfare state became the model for most European countries after the war.

Thus began the slow decline which would drive the British ever deeper into economic failure. Having been nationalized, the banks, the steel companies, the coal companies, the electrical utilities and the gas utilities manifested ever-shrinking profits, and then ever-growing losses. The nationalization of both medical insurance and health care was massively expensive, but the industries, because they were nationalized, could generate no wealth to pay for the medical health system. Taxes were raised steadily, driving family incomes down. The government also began to borrow money and thereby created a national debt. The quality of healthcare also steeply declined. Only the very wealthy could afford to leave the government system and seek adequate health care in private practices. The nationalized health system began with the goal of providing quality healthcare to all, but ended instead by limiting the poor and middle-class citizens to substandard government hospitals. This outcome was inevitable, despite the good intentions of the Parliament.

By May 1979, the British economy was a mess. In that month, Margaret Thatcher took office as the nation’s first female prime minister. But to her mind, it was far more important that she was the first prime minister to have a degree in science. She had studied chemistry at Oxford, and had worked in the private sector for years. She brought a scientific perspective to economic policy. Her logic was rigorous. So it was, then, that common sense

returned to power under Margaret Thatcher (b. 1925), the first woman prime minister in British history. Thatcher pledged to lower taxes, reduce government bureaucracy, limit social welfare, restrict union power, and end inflation. The “Iron Lady,” as she was called, did break the power of the labor unions. Although she did not eliminate the basic components of the social welfare system, she did use austerity measures to control inflation. “Thatcherism,” as her economic policy was termed, improved the British economic situation.

Prosperity did not return immediately to England after Thatcher’s introduction of economic freedom. It was a type of “shock therapy” which at first caused the economy to stall. Thatcher understood, like a physical therapist, that short-term pain brings long-term gain. After a brief uptick in problems like unemployment, Thatcher’s policies brought solid prosperity to England.

Thatcher had rescued Britain from policies which would have destroyed it, but she endured tremendous opposition. Those employed by the governments to oversee nationalized industries had well-paid comfortable jobs, even if their companies lost money year after year. Political groups had arisen over the years to elect representatives to Parliament to keep the money-losing nationalization schemes in place. The hatred directed toward Thatcher was bitter. It took not only her logical understanding of economics, but also her character and courage to implement her policies in the fact of such intolerant opposition. Charles Moore writes:

The Iron Lady is the name of the new film in which Meryl Streep stars as Margaret Thatcher. You have only to consider the title itself to understand the impact of the person portrayed. It helps explain why, in these hard times, she and her legacy arouse even more interest than they did in the boom era at the end of the 20th century.

Thatcher not only changed the British economy; she changed the presuppositions of economic and political leaders in many countries. By the time she left office, even the political party which opposed her had embraced many of her policies. Tony Blair, not a member of her party, carried Thatcherism forward when he was elected to office by the party which had opposed Thatcher. In Europe, leaders began to rethink nationalization of industries and socialized medicine. Several European nations avoided economy decline by embracing Thatcherism. Those nations which did not follow Thatcher’s lead paid the price, like Greece, as they endured painful economic collapses.

Margaret Thatcher showed the way toward economic sanity in the 1980’s, and for those who are willing to think carefully, her policies continue to show the way today.

The Iron Lady Saves England

She was without question the most powerful and the most influential woman of her time: that's a fact. She was also someone who demonstrated virtue in a way which regenerated people in more than one nation: that is also a fact, not an opinion. She was Margaret Thatcher, prime minister of England from May 1979 to November 1990.

In early 1979, England was economically at the brink of total collapse. The nation's financial structure had been decimated by taxes, debt, deficits, government spending, and regulation of the markets. The results were inflation and unemployment. As George Will writes, it was "Margaret Thatcher who helped bury socialism as a doctrine of governance."

Like a bucket of cold water on a drowsy snoozer, Thatcher's introduction of radical economic freedom came at first as a shock to the system. At first briefly painful, as the vital signs of the economy were forced to hit bottom to jump-start a wave of entrepreneurial activity, Thatcher's leadership was invigorating and bracing in the long run. Her tactics foreshadowed the economic doctrine of 'shock therapy' which would deliver freedom a few years later to the nations of Eastern Europe as they emerged from the tyranny of Soviet communism.

She aimed to be the moral equivalent of military trauma, shaking her nation into vigor through rigor. As stable societies mature, they resemble long-simmering stews — viscous and lumpy with organizations resistant to change and hence inimical to dynamism. Her program was sound money, laissez faire, social fluidity and upward mobility through self-reliance and other “vigorous virtues.” She is the only prime minister whose name came to denote a doctrine — Thatcherism. (“Churchillian” denotes not a political philosophy but a leadership style.) When she left office in 1990, the trade unions had been tamed by democratizing them, the political argument was about how to achieve economic growth rather than redistribute wealth, and individualism and nationalism were revitalized.

Earning for herself the reputation of being a woman of ideas, and earning for her Tory party the reputation of being the party of ideas, her intellect extended beyond domestic economics. Donald Rumsfeld, who was Special Envoy to the Middle East in January 1984, was working to see if any solution could be found to the bitter and complex civil war which was destroying the country of Lebanon, when he met with Margaret Thatcher. Although Thatcher was generally and often allied with the United States, she was not afraid to disagree: she pointed out to Rumsfeld that American diplomats were sending mixed messages. Rumsfeld writes:

When I met with British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, she made it clear as only she could that when it came to U.S. policy on Lebanon, she was at best a reluctant team player. I had long been a fan of "the Iron Lady," as the Soviets called her. I found that her stern reputation masked a dispassionate realism - which was certainly visible in her approach to the Middle East. In our meeting, she bore to the heart of the issue with crisp, unforgiving precision. She was skeptical of Lebanese President Gemayel's ability to expand his coalition and, in a break from the American position, equally skeptical of Israel's role in the standoff. She believed that our coalition lacked a clear mandate. She did not favor taking a tough stance with Syria because she believed that we needed them for a successful Middle East peace effort. She noted that even when the United State challenged Syria, some American officials behaved in a way that signaled to the Syrians that we lacked the will or cohesion to actually follow through. A mixed message was the worst kind to send to an authoritarian regime, she noted. In that, as in many things, she was absolutely correct. If anyone left our meeting with an impression other than that the Prime Minister would be happy to be done with the whole business at the soonest possible opportunity, they hadn't been listening. In her public statements Thatcher was more diplomatic, offering words of solidarity with her political soul mate, President Reagan. But she also indicated what I knew well: our time was running out.

Later in that same year, Thatcher demonstrated courage in the face an attack on her life. Rumsfeld writes:

A month later, Prime Minister Thatcher barely escaped assassination by the Irish Republican Army. She was in her hotel room when a bomb exploded, destroying the bathroom she had been in only moments earlier. Her would-be assassins left Mrs. Thatcher a chilling note that I've reflected on many times since. "We have only to be lucky once," they wrote to her. "You will have to be lucky always."

As quick as she was to criticize American diplomatic efforts vis-a-vis Syria, so quick she was also to agree with America's desire to retain its own sovereignty. The issue arose in discussions surrounding the 'Law of the Sea Treaty' which, if enacted, would have each signatory nation surrender its sovereign control over its borders, and instead allow an international tribunal to decide matters over each nation's coasts, waterways, and maritime boundaries. In 1982, Rumsfeld visited England to discuss the matter with Thatcher. He recalls:

A few days later I met with Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher at 10 Downing Street in London. I explained my mission and Reagan's concerns. Quite briskly, Mrs. Thatcher bore right into the heart of the matter.

"Mr. Ambassador, if I understand correctly, what this Law of the Sea Treaty proposes is nothing less than the international nationalization of roughly two thirds of the Earth's surface," she began. "And you know how I feel about nationalization."

"I do indeed, Prime Minister," I responded. Mrs. Thatcher had made transferring nationalized businesses, from utilities to mining companies, back to the private sector a hallmark of her premiership.

She smiled. "Tell Ronnie I'm with him."

About the first Iraq War (1990/1991), Thatcher also had strong opinions. She saw that, if Saddam Hussein were allowed to retain power in Iraq, the root causes of the war would not have been addressed. She foresaw that leaving him in power necessitated a second such Gulf War. She urged the United States to press on in the war. America's stated goal in the war had been to liberate the oppressed nation of Kuwait, which had been invaded by Saddam Hussein's forces. The United States planned to stop after liberating Kuwait, and not to continue the war until Saddam's government fell. Rumsfeld writes:

Others I respected had a different view. While still Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher had famously warned President George H.W. Bush not to "go wobbly" after Iraq's invasion of Kuwait. But the formidable Thatcher had been voted out of office before the war was concluded. She seemed unhappy with the result in Iraq. "There is the aggressor, Saddam Hussein, still in power," she later observed. Contrasting his fate to Bush's and hers, she noted, "There is the President of the United States, no longer in power. There is the Prime Minister of Britain, who did quite a lot to get things there, no longer in power. I wonder who won?"

A strong sense of justice guided Thatcher, whether it was returning the ownership of utilities and mining companies back to the people, or defending the rights of a sovereign nation to defend its own territory. Prior to Thatcher, the British government had followed a trend of nationalization. All kinds of businesses, from airlines to car companies and from railroads to telephone companies, had been taken over by the government. Ordinary people were not allowed to own such companies, nor were ordinary citizens allowed to make decisions about how such companies would be operated. When Thatcher was undoing such nationalization, she was transferring both ownership and decision-making authority back to the common people. Likewise, she saw no great complexity in the decision to defend British soil when the Argentines attacked the Falkland Islands. In 1982, the Argentines invaded the islands, which were recognized by all parties as belonging to the English. As she would say, almost ten years later about a different war, "When good has to be upheld, when evil has to be overcome, then Britain will take up arms!"

Like many wars in the last half of the twentieth century, and in the first quarter of the twenty-first century, it was an undeclared war. Neither the British Parliament nor the Argentine government officially declared war. Nonetheless, Thatcher was firm and decisive in her response to the unprovoked Argentine aggression. The British were somewhat disappointed that the United States did not eagerly and promptly join the English cause. Eventually, President Reagan did support the British war effort, but only after long deliberation. The Americans found the situation complex, given the Monroe Doctrine. But Argentina's attack was clearly a case of militaristic expansion and of firing on innocent and unaware civilians. George Will writes:

The Argentine junta learned of her decisiveness when it seized the Falklands. The British, too, learned. A Tory MP said, “She cannot see an institution without hitting it with her handbag.”

Thus the same vigor which she unleashed at the Argentine attackers was the same vigor which she unleashed at the economic regulations which were impoverishing the Britons.

Britain has periodically been a laboratory for economic ideas — those of Adam Smith, John Maynard Keynes, the socialism of postwar Labor. Before the ascendancy of Thatcher — a disciple of Milton Friedman and Friedrich Hayek — Tories tried to immunize Britain against socialism by administering prophylactic doses of the disease. But by 1979, Britain’s fundamental political arrangements were at issue: Such was the extortionate power of the unions to paralyze the nation that the writ of Parliament often seemed to run not beyond a few acres along the Thames.

Thatcher's first few months in office were bumpy. As she predicted, the transition to a free market, while bringing liberty and prosperity in the long run, would cause growth pains in the short run. Despite the short-term economic pains, the voters saw hope on the horizon, and reelected Thatcher.

In 1979, she won the most lopsided election since 1945, when there had not been an election for 10 years. In 1983, she became the first Tory since 1924 to win two consecutive elections. In 1987, she won a third. Her 12 consecutive years were an achievement without precedent since the 1832 Reform Act moved Britain, gingerly, toward mass democracy. The most consequential peacetime prime minister since Disraeli, by 1990 she had become the first prime minister to govern through an entire decade since the Earl of Liverpool from 1812 to 1827.

Having so many consecutive years in office, Thatcher was able to significantly change the course of England. The socialist habit of nationalizing industries, taxing people at continuously increasing rates, and taking economic decision-making away from ordinary citizens had been a British pattern in the decades after WWII. Thatcher would change that. Her goals were clear: reduce taxes, let people own businesses and operate them, and allow economic creativity to flourish unimpeded by governmental regulation. David Brooks writes:

Margaret Thatcher was a world historical figure for the obvious reasons. Before Thatcher, history seemed to be moving in the direction of Swedish social democracy. After Thatcher, it wasn’t. But her most pervasive influence was on the level of values.

She was formed by her disgust with 1970s Britain. She witnessed a moral shift in those years, away from people who were competitive and toward people who were cooperative, away from the ambitious and toward those who were self-nurturing and self-exploring, away from the culture of rectitude and toward the culture of narcissism. Especially in the prestigious reaches of society, people were often uninterested in technology and disdainful of commerce.

The tectonic shift which Thatcher wrought in British politics was so powerful that after her time as prime minister, both her party and the opposing party would see her views as axiomatic. It was not one of Thatcher's Tories, but an opponent from the Labor Party, Tony Blair, who would in many ways carry on both her domestic and foreign policy legacies.

Her political legacy may be so enduring because it is so foundational. It has not to do with the intricacies of policy, but rather with the goals and justifications of policy. Pragmatism can be, in some cases, a virtue; but it is never by itself a virtue. Rather, pragmatism is a virtue only in the service of some higher cause, like justice or charity. Justice may demand an armed response to Argentine attackers; justice may demand deregulation to lift citizens out of poverty and give them a fair chance at entering the middle class. Pragmatism is the tactic to justice's strategy. Pragmatism may ensure that the efforts on behalf of justice are effective. But a clear vision of justice is necessary. David Brooks continues:

In the political sphere this translated into an aversion to conflict, a desperate desire for consensus, which often translated into policy drift and a gradual surrender to entrenched interests. Thatcher saw this as a loss of national potency. She saw it as a loss of will, a settling for mediocrity, a betrayal of Britain’s great history and an acceptance of decline.

The daughter of a small grocer, she led a fervent bourgeois Risorgimento. She was the voice of the ambitious middle class. She lionized the self-made striver. Loving tidiness, she checked to see if the space above the picture frames was properly dusted.

She championed a certain sort of individual, one who possessed what the writer Shirley Robin Letwin called the Vigorous Virtues: “upright, self-sufficient, energetic, adventurous, independent-minded, loyal to friends and robust against foes.”

If her predecessors stood for consensus and the endless negotiation of interests over beer and sandwiches, Thatcher stood for steadfast conviction on behalf of the national good. An admirer of the free market, her companion goal was to restore the authority of the state, and she was willing to centralize power to do it.

At a time when others were sliding toward moral relativism, Thatcher stood for individual responsibility, moral self-confidence and often, it has to be admitted, self-righteous certitude.

Put aside her personal failings, she was a militant optimist for a country slipping unconsciously toward defeatism. Beyond her policy decisions, she was part of a values shift.

Today, bourgeois virtues like industry, competitiveness, ambition and personal responsibility are once again widely admired, by people of all political stripes. Today, technology is central to our world and tech moguls are celebrated.

Tony Blair and Bill Clinton embraced and ratified her policy shifts. Millions more have been influenced by her idea of what makes an admirable individual.

Margart Thatcher was guided by ideas, not by personalities. She enjoyed an excellent friendship with American presidents and diplomats, and yet was not hesitant about dissenting from American policies when her sense of justice demanded it. She was disappointed by Reagan's lack of instant enthusiasm for her war against Argentina; she was not enthusiastic about Reagan's military liberation of Grenada. She advocated shifting Cold War strategies to include defense in addition to offense: she supported America's development of the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI). Likewise, she was not swayed by the leaders of her own political party, with whom she sometimes disagreed. Indeed, it was her own party which finally turned her out of office, a departure which she made with grace, giving a final memorable speech in Parliament.

A Samurai's Identity Crisis

The Japanese social class appearing under the title ‘samurai’ has a long and complex history. Originally a warrior class, it eventually became a social class. This transition provoked a long-term identity crisis. The samurai were no longer needed as warriors, having been replaced by other military structures. While samurai were not fully accepted as aristocrats or nobles, they were also something more than the commoners. One samurai left an extensive memoir, giving us an insider’s view into the life of a samurai who is wrestling with the fact that he is born into a social class whose place in the community is ambiguous, a social class not fully accepted by either those above it or those below it.

Katsu Kokichi’s autobiography, Musui’s Story, gives the reader a concrete example of a samurai during the Tokugawa era. Katsu manifests, up-close, the effects his social status has on his daily life – a social status that was rapidly becoming, if it had not already become, an anachronism.

The samurai arose as a social class during the Kamakura era (1180 – 1333), although the roots of a military class certainly go back to earlier years. The process that led to the formalization of the samurai class is unclear in its earliest years. Historians entertain at least three distinct hypotheses about this earliest phase of a military social class. Significant is the fact that already in its infancy, there is some ambiguity about this group. Patricia Ebrey, Anne Walthall, and James Palais write:

The samurai plays such a central role in Japanese history from the twelfth to the nineteenth centuries that he appears almost timeless. Where he came from is a matter of debate.

If the origin of the group is ambiguous, its history is one of metamorphosis. Membership in this class was seen – by its own members and by the rest of society – as something being continually redesigned.

His connections with monarchy and court, and what it meant to be a samurai, changed over time. Historians once thought that the aristocracy reneged on its responsibility for maintaining peace early in the Heian period when it stopped executing criminals, allowed the conscript army to deteriorate, and permitted provincial governors to hire deputies rather than forsake the capital. By the tenth century, the countryside had fallen into disorder. Men in the provinces active in land reclamation projects armed themselves in local disputes and turned to warfare to protect their interests. A substantial warrior class arose, and in the twelfth century it turned on an effete and ineffectual monarchy.

A samurai’s self-concept was thus fraught with uncertainty. We see Musui wrestling to harmonize the inconsistent messages that he receives about his status. On the one hand, there is a Confucian sense about the necessity for honorable behavior, and the consequences for the lack of such honor: he reflects about “brave warriors who disregarded the laws of Heaven … and who came to grief.” On the other hand, the aristocracy views the samurai, who emerged from the lower classes, as not quite the equals of the nobles: internalizing the lower expectations placed on him, Musui recounts a drunken binge with no trace of shame, regret, or repentance. In such loutish behavior, Musui lives down to image projected by the upper classes onto the warrior class from which the samurai had emerged. As Ebrey, Walthall, and Palais write about the samurai:

They dressed in iron armor and animal skins rather than silk, and many were illiterate. In the eyes of the Kyoto aristocrats, they were rustic boors, hardly more civilized than the Emishi they were called to fight.

Yet the samurai also saw themselves, and others saw them, as being above other social classes:

The verb samurau means to serve; the first samurai were warriors who held the sixth court rank along with scholars, scribes, and artisans. Other terms for fighting men did not carry the connotation of service to the court. By acquiring court rank and offices, such as guard at the left gate, samurai distinguished themselves from commoners. Warriors either sought rank themselves or accepted the leadership of someone who did. When royal scions or Fujiwara descendants moved to the provinces in search of careers that eluded them at court, their qualifications for rank based on their distinguished lineage helped them attract followers. In political terms, the need to have success at arms legitimized by court approbation, rank, and title always limited warrior autonomy.

Accordingly, as Musui recounts his activities as fundraiser for a temple, he speaks of recruiting ‘merchants’ and ‘peasants’ in way that indicates that they are not of the same class as ‘my fellow swordsmen.’

Given this equivocation about his niche in society, in Musui’s daily life, activities that hint of an aristocratic life of leisure, like practicing fencing in his spare time, alternate with more practical pursuits hinting of a more direct interest in sustenance. He writes:

I now had to earn pocket money. I tore around doing favors for people and racked my brain thinking up moneymaking schemes.

Musui is living in a social structure that emerged centuries earlier. Between the Kamakura era in which the samurai were first clearly categorized as a class distinct from warriors in general, and the Tokugawa era in which Musui lives, Japanese society continued to modify the social status of the samurai. Ebrey, Walthall, and Palais write that, in 1588, Hideyoshi

tried to insist on a rigid status distinction between samurai and commoners by forbidding all but samurai from wearing two swords, one long and one short. Thereafter, commoners might own swords, but they could not put them on display. Hideyoshi issued a series of decrees prohibiting samurai from leaving their lord’s service to become merchants or cultivators and preventing farmers from deserting their fields to become city folk. Although it proved impossible to make clear distinctions between various statuses and some domains such as Satsuma or Tosa continued to recognize rustic samurai (goshi), Hideyoshi’s intent remained the law of the land until 1871.

Although this move was intended to elevate the social status of samurai, and seems to have done so to some extent, it also left it with its original ambiguity, and added a second layer of ambiguity because the very fact of social change creates ambiguity. This uncertainty would affect both the values which the samurai internalized, and the values which they exemplified to those around them – i.e., the values which society at large imputed to them.

So we see Musui remind his brother, in a heated moment in which they nearly come to blows, that he, too, is “an honorable retainer of the shogun.” What is Musui’s concept of ‘honor’ – what are his values? Again, with no remorse or chagrin, he reports that he spent his “days carousing to” his heart’s content, and that

I had some bills at the brothels, but instead of paying them, I got hold of six ryo and invited Masanosuke and one of his father’s retainers to the Yoshiwara.

Even if the reader makes allowances for the possibility of different sexual ethics – although Musui’s behavior might be vulgar even by those standards – his choice to squander money in the ‘red light district’ when he has financial obligations still violates the sense of honor which we can reasonably attribute to the Tokugawa society. Musui has, then, a nominal honor by virtue of his birth into the samurai class, but he visibly fails to embody the ethics associated with this honor.

The larger Tokugawa culture, in which Musui and his fellow samurai of the 1800’s found themselves, was characterized largely by consumerism and advancing education.

Consumerism typifies especially the urban areas – Musui’s Edo is modern Tokyo. The city had large shopping districts, a wide variety of products available, and specialization in professions (e.g., an emerging class of lawyers). A “fixed price system for cash” began to be more common, and commercials were incorporated into theatrical plays. Celebrities endorsed products, and enterprising showmen developed products named after themselves, engineering product placements in their own stage dramas, and featuring them in woodblock prints – an early form of junk mail. Edo hosted a high degree of commercialization and consumerist culture – all by the year 1800, before Musui was born.

Tokugawa’s popular culture enjoyed a high literacy rate. A strong educational system was in place, allowing for study of Confucian and Buddhist classics for the aristocrats; but for the masses, the chief significance of this educational boom was the ability to read, along with abilities in mathematics. Written materials fueled the front end of this consumer society – the ‘user interface’ – and calculation powered the other side, both in terms of financial accounting and ‘product design.’ The fact that we can use these startlingly anachronistic terms reveals exactly how modern Tokugawa society had become – and with that modernization, how far removed the medieval origins of the samurai class appeared to that society. The samurai seemed like something that didn’t quite belong.

Musui found a way to adapt. He engages in the Edo economy: he “went about learning to appraise swords.” Appraisal is recognized as a specific and distinct professional skill, a sign of a developed economy. Later applying this skill, Musui enters into the world of entrepreneurship and the startup of a small business:

I also had to make ends meet, so I tried my hand at dealing in swords and other military accoutrements. In the beginning I lost money – fifty or sixty ryo the first month and a half – but I got used to the business little by little, and by attending the second-hand goods market every night, I found I could really bring in profits.

Musui has become integrated into the commercialized Tokugawa urban culture. Likewise, he is a product of its higher levels of education. Reading and writing letters is a regular feature of the narrative, and the business transactions into which he enters require proficiency in calculation.

Musui’s life in the context of the larger Tokugawa culture is colored by an ambivalence about his place in society as a samurai. This equivocation manifests itself in his everyday life: a mixture of aristocratic leisure and middle class concerns for income. It manifests itself in his self-contradictory values and ethics, which have added aristocratic rhetoric about honor as a veneer over the original coarse behavior of the warrior class. And it makes the entire samurai class, this inconsistent mix of oafish soldiers with titled airs, an anachronism as its individual members try to navigate their way in the waters of an educated consumerist society.

Not a Social Darwinist: Herbert Spencer

It is common to read that Herbert Spencer was a "social Darwinist," or even the founder of "social Darwinism" - such assertions are frequent various history books. But some careful scholars question such assertions. David Weinstein, for example, writes that Spencer was not a social Darwinist. In so doing, Weinstein is contradicting those who call Spencer a social Darwinist. He accuses them of misreading Spencer: G.E. Moore, Richard Hofstadter, Andrew Carnegie, William Graham Sumner, etc.

One bit of evidence given by those who see Spencer as a social Darwinist is his use of the phrase "survival of the fittest." The phrase does indeed occur in his writings, two times at least. But what Spencer meant by it needs to be examined. Weinstein points out that Spencer stated that "fittest" and "best" are not equivalent. This is one bit of distance, then, between Spencer and social Darwinism. Spencer wrote:

The beneficial results of the survival of the fittest, prove to be immeasurably greater than those above indicated. The process of "natural selection," as Mr. Darwin called it, cooperating with a tendency to variation and to inheritance of variations, he has shown to be a chief cause (though not, I believe, the sole cause) of that evolution through which all living things, beginning with the lowest and diverging and rediverging as they evolved, have reached their present degrees of organization and adaptation to their modes of life. So familiar has this truth become that some apology seems needed for naming it. And yet, strange to say, now that this truth is recognized by most cultivated people — now that the beneficent working of the survival of the fittest has been so impressed on them that, much more than people in past times, they might be expected to hesitate before neutralizing its action — now more than ever before in the history of the world, are they doing all they can to further survival of the unfittest!

Passages such as the one above can make Spencer seem like a social Darwinist. But some careful reading might prevent us from leaping to that conclusion. Spencer takes the concept of evolution from the biological to the sociological, but in this way: that it is not individuals who compete in the "survival of the fittest," but rather competing social structures - competing societies. In this, then, he parts ways from the typical social Darwinist. This is clear also in the following passage:

Thus by survival of the fittest, the militant type of society becomes characterized by profound confidence in the governing power, joined with a loyalty causing submission to it in all matters whatever. And there must tend to be established among those who speculate about political affairs in a militant society, a theory giving form to the needful ideas and feelings; accompanied by assertions that the law-giver if not divine in nature is divinely directed, and that unlimited obedience to him is divinely ordered.

We see both that Spencer is writing of competition between societies, not individuals, and that he is not asserting that "fittest" means "best" - in some cases, the survivor is a society with which Spencer finds fault.

Spencer certainly does dabble in Darwinism and evolution. He sees various forms of society developing over time. But this does not automatically place him among the hard-hearted social Darwinists. Spencer also dabbled in utilitarianism. David Weinstein writes:

One should not underestimate what “rational” utilitarianism implied for Spencer metaethically. In identifying himself as a “rational” utilitarian, Spencer distanced himself decidedly from social Darwinism, showing why Moore's infamous judgment was misplaced. Responding to T.H. Huxley's accusation that he conflated good with “survival of the fittest,” Spencer insisted that “fittest” and “best” were not equivalent. He agreed with Huxley that though ethics can be evolutionarily explained, ethics nevertheless preempts normal struggle for existence with the arrival of humans. Humans invest evolution with an “ethical check,” making human evolution qualitatively different from non-human evolution. “Rational” utilitarianism constitutes the most advanced form of “ethical check[ing]” insofar as it specifies the “equitable limits to his [the individual's] activities, and of the restraints which must be imposed upon him” in his interactions with others (Spencer, vol. I, 1901: 125–28). In short, once we begin systematizing our inchoate utilitarian intuitions with the principle of equal freedom and its derivative moral rights, we begin “check[ing]” evolutionary struggle for survival with unprecedented skill and subtlety. We self-consciously invest our utilitarianism with stringent liberal principles in order to advance our well-being as never before.

For Spencer, then, his utilitarianism and his liberalism mean that humans intervene in the Darwinist process and override it. Society is precisely where Darwinism stops and is replaced by deliberate and conscious human decision. Weinstein continues:

Not only was Spencer less than a “social Darwinist” as we have come to understand social Darwinism, but he was also less unambiguously libertarian as some, such as Eric Mack and Tibor Machan, have made him out to be. Not only his underlying utilitarianism but also the distinction, which he never forswears, between “rights properly so-called” and “political” rights, makes it problematic to read him as what we would call a ‘libertarian’.

Both utilitarianism and libertarianism can be, but are not necessarily, fertile ground for social Darwinism. This is perhaps one reason that readers have understood Spencer to be a social Darwinist when maybe he is not. It is easy to lose sight of the fact that some of Spencer's "survival of the fittest" rhetoric is not about individuals competing with each other for existence, and not even about societies competing with each other, but rather about forms of society competing with each other. He writes about one or more primitive types of society, but more central to his thought is a later phase of development in which a "military" society gives way to an "industrial" society. His use of these words is peculiar and we need to understand what me meant by them; it is easy to misunderstand Spencer on this point if we proceed with our everyday definitions of 'military' and 'industrial' which are not quite the same as his definitions.

By a military society, Spencer seems to mean a highly-structured society - even more, an authoritarian one, which exerts relatively more control over the individual - and this, of course, is that against which Spenser's libertarian instincts arise. To be sure, Weinstein's caution about labeling Spencer as a libertarian is well-noted; but if not a libertarian, than a classical liberal will react against the authoritarian control which Spencer calls a 'military' society. Such a society need not, for Spencer, take the form of arms and war; it could be a peacetime society with little or no organized army. Frederick Copleston writes about Spencer:

Spencer does not deny that the militant type of society had an essential role to play in the process of evolution considered as a struggle for existence in which the fittest survive. But he maintains that though inter-social conflict was necessary for the formation and growth of societies, the development of civilization renders war increasingly unnecessary. The militant type of society thus becomes an anachronism, and a transition is required to what Spencer calls the industrial type of society. This does not mean that the struggle for existence ceases. But it changes its form, becoming 'the industrial struggle for existence', in which that society is best fitted to survive which produces 'the largest number of the best individuals — individuals best adapted for life in the industrial state'. In this way Spencer tries to avoid the accusation that when he has arrived at the concept of the industrial type of society, he abandons the ideas of the struggle for existence and of the survival of the fittest.

By an industrial society, Spencer is thinking not of factories, labor unions, and eight-hour shifts on assembly lines. Rather he is thinking of being 'industrious' and creative. He emphasizes the notion of liberty - the freedom to create, invent, or produce. Copleston continues:

It would be a great mistake to suppose that by the industrial type of society Spencer means simply a society in which the citizens are occupied, exclusively or predominantly, in the economic life of production and distribution. For an industrial society in this narrow sense would be compatible with a thoroughgoing regulation of labour by the State. And it is precisely this element of compulsion which Spencer is concerned to exclude. On the economic level, he is referring to a society dominated by the principle of laissez-faire. Hence in his view socialist and communist States would be very far from exemplifying the essence of the industrial type of society. The function of the State is to maintain individual freedom and rights, and to adjudicate, when necessary, between conflicting claims. It is not the business of the State to interfere positively with the lives and conduct of the citizens, except when interference is required for the maintenance of internal peace.

His emphasis on freedom, in the sense of not only an economic free market, but a more generalized attitude of laissez-faire in the non-economic aspects of society, can leave Spencer seeming like a libertarian or social Darwinist. But his understanding of freedom also includes an active role for society to defend the freedom of the individual. This would seem a departure from Darwinism, inasmuch as those who might not survive, or whose freedom might not survive, without intervention are rescued by intervention. As Copleston writes:

In other words, in the ideal type of industrial society, as Spencer interprets the term, emphasis is shifted from the totality, the society as a whole, to its members considered as individuals. 'Under the industrial regime the citizen's individuality, instead of being sacrificed by the society, has to be defended by the society. Defence of his individuality becomes the society's essential duty.' That is to say, the cardinal function of the State becomes that of equitably adjusting conflicting claims between individual citizens and preventing the infringement of one man's liberty by another.

While Spencer's condemnation of labor laws (designed to protect workers), governmental poor relief, government schools, and government sanitation can make him seem like the most miserly of hard-hearted social Darwinists, this perception of him must be moderated in view of his belief that such benefits can not only be achieved, but better achieved, by voluntary associations in the private sector.

Obviously, in this resolute attack on 'the coming slavery' Spencer could not appeal simply to the automatic working-out of any law of evolution. His words are clearly inspired by a passionate conviction in the value of individual liberty and initiative, a conviction which reflected the character and temperament of a man who had never at any period of his life been inclined to bow before constituted authority simply because it was authority. And it is a notorious fact that Spencer carried his attack on what he regarded as encroachments by the State on private liberty to the extent of condemning factory legislation, sanitary inspection by government officials, State management of the Post Office, poor relief by the State and State education. Needless to say, he did not condemn reform as such or charitable relief work or the running of hospitals and schools. But his insistence was always on voluntary organization of such projects, as opposed to State action, management and control. In short, his ideal was that of a society in which, as he put it, the individual would be everything and the State nothing, in contrast with the militant type of society in which the State is everything and the individual nothing.

If the reader refers to Spencer's detailed and stinging critique of legislation, it will be remembered that Spenser demonstrated that legislation is not only useless, but harmful. Legislation designed to make travel safer caused more deaths on passenger ships. Regulation intended to improve public sanitation increased total fatalities from contagious disease. So what seems prima facie as humane legislation is in reality harmful to the vulnerable, to the ones whom it is intended to help: the poor, the physically disabled, the widows, orphans, foreigners, etc. Spencer is highlighting the sometimes counterintuitive reality of legislation: regulations enacted to help the poor often actually hurt the poor. Far from heartless, Spencer is ensuring that the individual will not "be ruthlessly sacrificed" to some abstract socialist formulation of "the common good," as Copleston formulates it:

At the same time Spencer's hostility to social legislation which nowadays is taken for granted by the vast majority of citizens in Great Britain should not blind us to the fact that he, like Mill, saw the dangers of bureaucracy and of any exaltation of the power and functions of the State which tends to stifle individual liberty and originality. To the present writer at any rate it seems that concern with the common good leads to an approval of State action to a degree far beyond what Spencer was prepared to endorse. But it should never be forgotten that the common good is not something entirely different from the good of the individual. And Spencer was doubtless quite right in thinking that it is for the good both of individuals and of society in general that citizens should be able to develop themselves freely and show initiative. We may well think that it is the business of the State to create and maintain the conditions in which individuals can develop themselves, and that this demands, for example, that the State should provide for all the means of education according to the individual's capacity for profiting by it. But once we accept the principle that the State should concern itself with positively creating and maintaining the conditions which will make it possible for every individual to lead a decent human life in accordance with his or her capacities, we expose ourselves to the danger of subsequently forgetting that the common good is not an abstract entity to which the concrete interests of individuals have to be ruthlessly sacrificed. And Spencer's attitude, in spite of its eccentric exaggerations, can serve to remind us that the State exists for man and not man for the State. Further, the State is but one form of social organization: it is not the only legitimate form of society. And Spencer certainly understood this fact.

Spencer seems to moderate his Darwinistic tendencies, at least in Copleston's formulation. Survival of the fittest is moderated by survival of the deserving. Human intervention overrides the raw Darwinistic process.

As has already been indicated, Spencer's political views were partly the expression of factual judgments, connected with his interpretation of the general movement of evolution, and partly an expression of judgments of value. For example, his assertion that what he calls the industrial type of society possesses a greater survival value than other types was partly equivalent to a prediction that it would in fact survive, in virtue of the trend of evolution. But it was also partly a judgment that the industrial type of society deserved to survive, because of its intrinsic value. Indeed, it is dear enough that with Spencer a positive evaluation of personal liberty was the really determining factor in his view of modern society. It is also clear that if a man is resolved that, as far as depends on him, the type of society which respects individual freedom and initiative will survive, this resolution is based primarily on a judgment of value rather than on any theory about the automatic working-out of a law of evolution.

Writing at a time before informed doubts had been formulated against Darwinism, Spencer embraced his own nuanced version of evolution. In so doing, he took biological evolution as a foundational fact, while seeing that significantly different interpretations of evolution a subject for serious inquiry. Thus, while he spent energy fine-tuning the details of evolutionary process, he considered it unnecessary to take pains examining the foundation of evolution itself. Had he lived a century later - he died in 1903 - he might have answered some of the questions posed by the Miller-Urey experiment's failure to generate signs of life, or discoveries made by Francis Collins in the course of the Human Genome Project. In any case, Spencer was unaware of the arguments which would erode faith in Darwinism.

Believing as he did, Spencer's confidence in Darwinism in general allowed him to assume that only the details of evolution needed to be worked out, given that the broad principle of it was, in his mind, solidly established. He noted the difference between individual beings competing existence for existence, versus species completing with each other for existence. Like the complexities which arise when one attempts to calculate utility, competing calculations regarding survival arise if Darwinism is taken as foundational. Conflicts between the survival of the individual being and the survival of the species are but one form of these complexities. Spencer hoped, however, to find in this tangle of intricacies a route which would allow compassion and humane action to find a home within an evolutionary process. As Copleston puts it,

Conduct in general, including that of animals, consists of acts adjusted to ends. And the higher we proceed in the scale of evolution, the clearer evidence do we find of purposeful actions directed to the good either of the individual or of the species. But we also find that teleological activity of this kind forms part of the struggle for existence between different individuals of the same species and between different species. That is to say, one creature tries to preserve itself at the expense of another, and one species maintains itself by preying on another.

Far from social Darwinism, Spencer thought that a evolutionary process would finally lead to a society in which altruism was normative. Instead of survival of the fittest, Spencer hoped to see the fittest working to ensure the survival of everyone else.

This type of purposeful conduct, in which the weaker goes to the wall, is for Spencer imperfectly evolved conduct. In perfectly evolved conduct, ethical conduct in the proper sense, antagonisms between rival groups and between individual members of one group will have been replaced by co-operation and mutual aid. Perfectly evolved conduct, however, can be achieved only in proportion as militant societies give place to permanently peaceful societies. In other words it cannot be achieved in a stable manner except in the perfectly evolved society, in which alone can the clash between egoism and altruism be overcome and transcended.

One of Spencer's flaws is his failure to anticipate more precisely the objection which would arise when some readers attempted to accuse him of social Darwinism. Although he seems to have anticipated this objection to a small extent, perhaps the ad hominem features of the times and places in which he did his writing prevented him from foreseeing such counterargument.

On the way toward a final society - and here Spencer, who otherwise seems soberly realistic, sounds a bit utopian - in which the competition for survival ceases and in which each individual is ultimately in secure situation with no need to struggle for existence, society develops sympathy, empathy, and cooperation. Jack Kaminsky summarizes Spencer thus:

Similarly, feelings of sociality and sympathy developed in human beings because in the struggle for survival men came to recognize that human cooperation is necessary, and the pleasures that accrue to the feeling of sociality were the rewards that guaranteed the continuation of such cooperation.

Spencer's version of evolution takes a turn which is either a brilliant intellectual move, or a self-destructive internal contradiction: he makes the engine of evolution - competition for survival, struggle for existence - into the force which will dismantle itself, when the end of the Darwinistic process is reached and there is no more competition or struggle. The midpoint in this development is precisely society's introduction of sympathy, empathy, and cooperation. Kamisky puts it this way:

The development of the feelings of sociality and sympathy led to the emergence of a new kind on entity, society, which is the subject of sociology and ethics.

Spencer thought that conscious deliberation occurred only in individuals and is not to be attributed to a group. He also thought that society existed for the benefit of its members, not the other way around.

For this reason, Spencer opposed all forms of socialism and was a firm believer in laissez-faire. In fact, he argued that if socialism were ever to arise in a state, it would lead to a very strict despotism.

Although one form of society replaced another in a form of "survival of the fittest," this struggle for existence, in Spencer's thought, did not apply in the same way to the individual. This may be a feature of his thought which protects him from the allegation of social Darwinism. Jack Kaminsky continues:

Even though Spencer believed that all societies must eventually die because of some external or internal disturbance, he was not a pessimist. He maintained that Western civilization, at least, was just entering its most mature stage of development. Sympathy and understanding were increasing. Nations were becoming less prone to resort to war in order to settle their differences. Freedom of speech, religion, and the press were being guaranteed. Society was no longer as rigidly stratified, and men could more easily move up the social ladder. Even representative government was gradual becoming universal. In fact, Spencer believed that with the proper indoctrination a society of the very highest order could continue for a long time.

In Spencer's version of utilitarianism, the concept of 'duty' is used to combine long-run utility with short-run utility in calculating the total utility, or pleasure, of any contemplated act. Spencer thought that short-run calculations came naturally to primitive man, while long-run duties were an artifact of society which represents progress. Kaminsky writes:

This account of duty also gives Spencer what he believes is a means of eliminating the traditional contradiction between egoism and altruism. At first men were primarily interested in themselves, as was necessary in a world where men could scarcely keep themselves alive. In fact, even in a more advance society, egoism serves some good, since the person who is very often healthier than others, and is, therefore, better able to care for others. But, in any case, egoism became modified by the recognition, that, if we wish to attain the objects that can afford us pleasure, we ought to help others because they in turn, will help us. Thus, according to Spencer, egoism and altruism are mutually compatible. We are concerned with the welfare of others because their welfare affects our own.

Spencer believed that the evolution of forms of society would result in a structure in which the interests of each member were protected by the other members. He may have been wrong, but again, this belief can be offered in the course of defending him against the accusation of social Darwinism. Kaminsky concludes:

Spencer’s social and ethical theories have also been challenged. His laissez-faire doctrines are simply not defensible in a world as highly industrialized as ours. Spencer believed that an industrial society would foster self-reliant, humane, and individualistic human beings, but he ignored the brutalities and injustices that could arise in such societies unless appropriate controls were introduced.

While Herbert Spencer's critique of legislative government is brilliant - and devastating - , his thought also contains serious flaws. One of his failures was his naive and enthusiastic acceptance of Darwinism, without seeing any of the serious objections which would eventually be raised against evolution. Another failure was an overly optimistic assessment of human nature: that the imperfections in human nature could be worked out by means of societal evolution. Finally, Spencer failed to anticipate the stinging assertion by his critics that he might be a social Darwinist; Spencer could have easily defended himself preemptively against such charges, by merely shifting emphasis and tone in his writing: we have shown that the elements are already present in his thought - it required merely balance to accentuate them.