It would hardly seem necessary, after twenty years of intense discussion in the American conservative movement, to reiterate in these pages one of the central political axioms of that movement—that the modern state, in its massive growth, is the primary instrumentality of liberal utopianism and the greatest contemporary enemy of man’s freedom and spiritual growth. Yet the appearance in the last issue of national review (Feb. 11) of Mr. Kenneth Melvin’s dithyramb of the welfare state “Big Brother is Dead Too,” proves that even in conservative circles old errors never die, that intellectually as well as politically “eternal vigilance is the price of liberty.”
In an apparent hope that our disgust with the nihilistic students and black revolutionaries around us will have deadened our critical faculties and blotted every lesson of history from our minds, Mr. Melvin presents to us, not only as the sole alternative to threatening anarchy, but as the ultimate haven of human hopes—the totalizing bureaucratic state:
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