WHEN VANGUARDS BECOME DIZZY WITH SUCCESS.

You get Geoffrey Hodgson's Wrong Turnings: How the Left Got Lost, which he intends as a reproach to his comrades among the Anointed, and which Book Review N^o. 7 notes, works well as a defense of Scottish Enlightenment concepts that at one time might have been a logic manual for pushing that Social Progress.  That pivot to the Scottish Enlightenment begins with his introduction, where he notes, "Here the debased term Right now covers democrats and authoritarians, peacemongers and warmongers, nationalists and individualists, egalitarians and inegalitarians, and defenderes and opponents of human rights.  There is nothing about private ownership and markets that necessarily implies racism or belligerent nationalism.  Yet these different things are conflated under the same label."  Truly, truly, I say unto you, people who claim to be conservative also contest what, exactly, they are conserving.

A similar incoherence haunts the Left.  "Accordingly, the term 'Left' is now applied to both decentralizers and statist centralizers, to both democrats and totalitarians, and to both defenders and sacrificers of liberty."  Insofar as the Left, as we have understood the concept since the French Revolution, is where the people who chafe under some or all of the Existing Ways of Doing Things gravitate, that might be understandable, but George Orwell diagnosed the problem with that way of thinking years ago.  What might have made sense for civil rights ("racism is a tool of the bosses") does not extend in a sensible way to environmental consciousness or feminism or the alphabet soup of pride.

Even if one sticks to political economy, as Professor Hodgson does, the incoherence surfaces.  "But eventually the term 'Right' also shifted massively, from nationalist and traditionalist apologies for the privileges of aristocracy, to greater advocacy of free markets and private ownership, which ironically had been the territory of the original Left in the French revolution."  Yes, and we sons of the American Revolution are quite happy to start with the Declaration, Constitution, Bill of Rights, Emancipation, and the Pacific Railroad and let the Left have the Jacobins, Terror, and guillotines.  "By 1980, some thinkers on the Right had captured a swathe of liberal [in the Scottish Enlightenment sense or that of Mill — Ed.] territory that had long been vacated by the Left.  And thus the Left gets lost.  "Step by step, the Left abandoned core principles of the Enlightenment."

Everything else follows from that observation.  Let's sample a few chapter headings.  "Socialism's Wrong Responses to the Right Problems."  "Marxism's Wrong Turnings."  "Down the Slippery Slope to Totalitarianism."  "The Left Descends into Cultural Relativism."  "The Left Condones Reactionary Religion."  And yes, somewhere Kurt Schlichter chuckles.

Recall, though, that Professor Hodgson considers himself a man of the Left, or at least of the Left before it left him: and he concludes, in the manner of eighteenth-century polemics (!) with two open letters.  One, addressed to contemporary libertarians of the free minds and free markets variety, asks them to remember the intellectual roots of their tradition, in the Scottish Enlightenment.  A second, addressed to former "fraternal comrades," notes, "History is no longer on your side.  Like everyone else in the real world, you are faced with the messy task of making do and muddling through."  It's not quite "Evolution is mutation, adaptation, and selection" with "Bet on emergence" stirred in, but urging the vanguardists to get in touch with epistemic humility is desirable.  "What matters is what works," he writes, and a lot of that was first codified in the Enlightenment.  It does little good to affix labels such as "left" or "right;" what matters is what is useful.

Cross-posted to Fifty Book Challenge.