From Here to There

In the thirties the journalistic woods were full of schemes to take us piecemeal from a competitive economy to collectivism. It was the “Fabian approach” the “inevitability of gradualism.” The success of many of these schemes in achieving their political ends has been accompanied all too often with a feeling of helplessness on the part of conservatives and libertarians. In consequence they have fluctuated between a “what’s the use” attitude and a dogmatic insistence on reiterating the pure milk of the individualist word. To the possibility of compromising toward their own object of desire—a wholly voluntary society—they have turned a deaf ear. They have not grasped the possibilities of a “Fabianism in reverse.”

This department proposes to remedy that deficiency. Once a month it will canvass the proposals, which in the present intellectual climate are invariably still-born, for working back by non-rev- olutionary degrees toward the goal of a voluntary society. When compromise is involved, the single test will be: “Does it favor the side of economic and social freedom in the classic, as opposed to the modern collectivistic, liberal sense?” We don’t ask for immediate purity; what we do insist upon is that contemporary currents should be reversed.

JC

About the Author

John Chamberlain

John Chamberlain (1903–1995) was an American writer.

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In the thirties the journalistic woods were full of schemes to take us piecemeal from a competitive economy to collectivism. It was the “Fabian approach” the “inevitability of gradualism.” The success of many of these schemes in achieving their political ends has been accompanied all too often with a feeling of helplessness on the part of conservatives and libertarians. In consequence they have fluctuated between a “what’s the use” attitude and a dogmatic insistence on reiterating the pure milk of the individualist word. To the possibility of compromising toward their own object of desire—a wholly voluntary society—they have turned a deaf ear. They have not grasped the possibilities of a “Fabianism in reverse.”

This department proposes to remedy that deficiency. Once a month it will canvass the proposals, which in the present intellectual climate are invariably still-born, for working back by non-rev- olutionary degrees toward the goal of a voluntary society. When compromise is involved, the single test will be: “Does it favor the side of economic and social freedom in the classic, as opposed to the modern collectivistic, liberal sense?” We don’t ask for immediate purity; what we do insist upon is that contemporary currents should be reversed.