Knowledge And Decisions

Prior to its decline and fall, imperial China was the preeminent nation in the world in technology, organization, commerce, and literature,¹⁶² and had the highest standard of living in the world, as late as the sixteenth century.¹⁶³ As in the case of Rome in its decline, so in the last century of the Ming dynasty, many people emigrated from China.¹⁶⁴ These “overseas Chinese” have flourished economically in numerous countries from southeast Asia to the Caribbean, while their native land languished in poverty and weakness, for lack of the practical skills and abilities of those driven out by the oppressions of governments dominated by intellectuals. These intellectuals, “applying the principles they learned from ancient Chinese writings to the realm of practical governance,”¹⁶⁵ promoted “a strong sense of social-welfare activism” in which “central governments assumed responsibility for the total well-being of all Chinese and asserted regulatory authority over all aspects of Chinese life.”¹⁶⁶ In short, Chinese intellectuals in power were impelled by Neo-Confucian ideals that would today be called “social justice.” But whatever the hoped-for results, the actual processes led to despotism, decline, and defeat.

Intellectuals’ promotion of despotism has not been confined to situations, like those in the Roman or Chinese empires, where they themselves were directly involved in wielding power or instigating violence. Even such admirers of freedom in principle as the eighteenth-century French philosophes were also admirers of contemporary Russian and Chinese despotism,¹⁶⁷ much like their twentieth-century counterparts. The reasons were also quite similar. The despotisms in question were seen as vehicles for the imposition of intellectuals’ designs on society at large. In the eighteenth-century despotisms “the men of letters served in places of eminence, at the very center of things.”¹⁶⁸ Class self-interest was, however, seen as the public interest. According to D’Alembert, “the greatest happiness of a nation is realized when those who govern agree with those who instruct it.”¹⁶⁹ In the nineteenth century free nations as well, as John Stuart Mill observed, “impatient reformers, thinking it easier to get possession of the government than of the intellects and dispositions of the people,” proposed to expand “the power of government.”¹⁷⁰

The French Revolution gave the eighteenth-century intellectuals a chance to rule directly, rather than by their influence on existing despots. Though disciples of the freedom-extolling philosophes and ostensibly concerned only with the public interest, their “all-powerful Committee of Public Safety ruled France absolutely as no monarch had ever been able to rule it.”¹⁷¹ The brief rule of Jacobin intellectuals was not only despotic and bloody, but totalitarian in its pervasiveness. The very names of months and years were changed to correspond with their ideology, as were the names of streets, people, and even playing cards.¹⁷² Their regulations extended to friendship and marriage: each adult male had to publicly declare who his friends were, and any married couple who did not either have children or adopt children within a specified time were to have their marriage dissolved and be separated by the government.¹⁷³ To administer all this control of individuals, the intellectual-politicians created a vast bureaucracy — never dismantled, and the enduring legacy of the Revolution long after the ideologues were replaced by Napoleon and then by innumerable other French governments. It was one of the earliest demonstrations of what it meant in practice to “arrange” a society according to “justice.”