Today’s so-called “populist” right and “populist” left want a strong state that is capable of overriding individual choices, whether it be in matters of trade or of domestic allocation of resources.
An interesting predecessor of this orientation was the American George Fitzhugh. Largely forgotten today, he was an influential 19th century intellectual who was deeply opposed to individual liberty and a strong proponent of slavery. See if this bit of Fitzhugh sounds especially contemporary: “Whether between nations or individuals, the war of free trade is constantly widening the relative abilities of the weak and the strong. It has been justly observed that under this system the rich are continuously growing richer and the poor poorer.”
Fitzhugh (1806–1881) was a Virginia lawyer who mainly earned a living with his pro-slavery books and newspaper articles. His conservatism and opposition to revolutions made him suspicious of secession, but he sided with the Confederacy once the Civil War began. He also accepted the Confederacy’s defeat gracefully. He even worked as a court agent in the post-bellum federal Freedmen’s Bureau and as an associate judge in the Freedmen’s Court. He loved all governments, at least potentially, including the federal government. In fact, his biggest lament was that the federal government wasn’t interventionist enough; as he wrote before the war, “The element of force exists probably in too small a degree in our Federal Government.”
Fitzhugh’s thesis / His first book, Sociology for the South: Or the Failure of Free Society, published in 1854, argues that the experiment of free societies has been a disaster for humanity and that a return to slavery is warranted. In this pamphleteer’s work, he used the recently coined word “sociology” to mean a theory criticizing free societies. His second book, Cannibals All! Or, Slaves Without Masters, published three years later, emphasizes, in what he said was “a more rigidly analytical manner,” that competition reduces individuals to economic cannibals, making the weak no better off than slaves—and, in fact, worse off because they lack the protection of a master.
According to Fitzhugh, supposedly free workers are exploited by capitalists. Competition forces them to underbid their fellow workers and accept subsistence wages, which leads them to destitute lives. As a result, crime and vice are rampant in free societies; men beat their wives. It was the general recognition of these problems that fueled socialism. “We are a Socialist,” he wrote, using the academic “we.” Free trade is the terrible result of liberty: “Admit liberty to be a good, and you leave no room to argue that free trade is an evil—because liberty is free trade.”
Like Aristotle, Fitzhugh starts from the idea that man is a social animal. Property is but a trust that must be exercised “for the good of all society.” And society is prior to the individual:
Man is born a member of society.… He and society are congenital. Society is the being—he one of the members of that being. He has no rights whatever, as opposed to the interests of society.… Whatever rights he has are subordinate to the good of the whole; and he has never ceded rights to it, for he was born a slave, and had no rights to cede.
People need to be governed because, without government, society would collapse into a war of all against all. Everybody needs government, but the weak more than others, Fitzhugh argued. Individuals who are able to control their passions can live under a government of laws; the others need a more personal and arbitrary government to be protected against exploiters and against themselves.
In competition and trade, “the intellectually astute and powerful conquer and subject those who are intellectually feeble,” he claimed. Government cares about its subjects and, therefore, must control them: “It is the duty of society to protect the weak.” But those who require protection and support must also accept being controlled, “for the price of security has ever been, and ever will be, the loss of liberty.”
All government is involuntary, he noted approvingly, and all forms of government are slavery. Family government is slavery, for children and wives obey their fathers and husbands. Submitting to labor associations to avoid or mitigate exploitation also implies slavery. Even more so does civil government. Soldiers are slaves. Everybody is more or less the slave of his government. This is a good thing, he thought, not bad.
When we look at the state of free societies, we realize that we need more, not less government, according to Fitzhugh. Socialists recognize this, but do not yet understand that “slavery is a form, and the very best form, of socialism.” Expounding on an idea that socialists and fascists would repeat endlessly in the future, he argued that “as civilization advances, liberty recedes.”
Fitzhugh, of course, wanted nothing to do with anarchy or “the sovereignty of the individual.” He was against all liberty: “no one ought to be free.” He summarized his political theory with one of his great aphorisms: “Liberty is an evil which government is intended to correct.”
For Fitzhugh, “negroes” need most to be controlled because they are naturally lazy, intemperate, and improvident. “Slavery,” he wrote, “is the only thing in the world that can enforce temperance.” He invited his readers to compare the Southern slave to the recently emancipated slave in the West Indies: the latter “is really free, and luxuriates in sloth, ignorance and liberty, as none but a negro can.”
A slave has a master to take care of him during his whole life. Indeed, it is in the master’s interest to take care of his property; “slaves never die of hunger,” he observed. It is because he has an owner that the slave is well taken care of, contrary to the destitute free laborer. In non-slave societies, domestic animals are better cared for than workers.
Slaves realize that they need masters, Fitzhugh claimed, and slaves are happy. A slave owns his master nearly as much as the master owns his slave, Fitzhugh reasoned, because the master owes continuing support to the slave, or else he must sell him. The slave is a member of his master’s family and indirectly partakes in the ownership of the farm; this is why he boasts of “our crops, horses, fields, and castle.”
The master is a socialist power who takes care of and controls his wards, Fitzhugh argued: “A Southern farm is the beau ideal of Communism.” Everybody receives according to his wants. The masters need more, they get more. The slaves need less, but they get everything they need: “The slaves are well fed, well clad, have plenty of fuel, and are happy.”
Slavery, Fitzhugh explains, has always existed. It was approved by the Bible and by the highest philosophical authorities of antiquity: “The true vindication of slavery must be founded on [Aristotle’s] theory of man’s social nature, as opposed to Locke’s theory of the Social Contract, on which latter Free Society rests for support.”
It’s not only the blacks who need masters: 19 out of every 20 individuals need “guardians, trustees, husbands, or masters,” Fitzhugh explained. The weak need to be protected from the strong:
We do not set children and women free because they are not capable of taking care of themselves, not equal to the constant struggle of society. To set them free would be to give the lamb to the wolf to take care of.
For many, freedom is slavery, and only (total) slavery can liberate them. If the poor and destitute could legally sell themselves into perpetual slavery, many would be happy and wise to do so.
Debatable approach / What to think about all this? Beyond his racism and his distasteful conclusions, Fitzhugh’s approach and methods are highly debatable (to put it charitably). He entertains an organicist vision of society: “The social body is of itself a thinking, acting, sentient being.” At other times, his approach is more neatly collectivist, as when he argues that, with the respective duties of slaves and masters and the social limitations of private property, “every man has property in his fellow-man!” (emphasis is Fitzhugh’s); or that “national wealth” is much greater than the sum of individual wealth. On this last point, he adds, “this is a most interesting subject,” but one that he has “not mastered”—a comment befitting many of the topics he covered.
As much as Fitzhugh’s theory looks coherent, it is full of gibberish and logical sleights of hand. He did not believe in organized thinking, preferring what he considered “common sense”: “Philosophy is always wrong and instinct and common sense always right.” “We are no regular-built scholar—have pursued no ‘royal road to mathematics,’ nor to anything else,” he was proud to say; but he claimed to “have, by observation and desultory reading, picked up our information by the wayside, and endeavored to arrange, generalize, and digest it for ourselves.” In an 1855 private letter, he confessed that “my pseudo-learning is all gathered from Reviews.… Newspapers, novels, Reviews, are the sources of my information.” This rejection of organized knowledge is typical of today’s populists, both of the right and left.
Fitzhugh never attended college, but he was not wholly ignorant of Western ideas and literature, as his numerous quotations from Virgil, Horace, and other ancients show. His culture, however, seems to have been pretty much limited to the ancients, the Bible, and a few modern reactionary writers. He thought that the South’s institutions “combine most that was good in those of Rome and Greece, of Judea, and of Medieval England.”
Fitzhugh disliked political economy, which “is the science of free society,” as opposed to socialism, which is “the science of slavery.” He had quite certainly not read Adam Smith or the other economists he attacked, like David Ricardo or Jean-Baptiste Say. He did not understand how an increase in the money supply would lead to a higher price level. He was hopelessly confused between money and wealth. He did not understand comparative advantages. Those are just a few examples of his intellectual shortcomings.
He also gets many of his facts wrong. Fitzhugh spent all his life in Virginia, and had little direct experience of the world, save for a short trip to the North to deliver a speech at the New Haven, Conn., Lyceum. Nonetheless, though he could not have known everything we now know about the industrial revolution and the economics of slavery, he could still have avoided his worst mistakes. Economic freedom was already increasing the standard of living for common laborers in the Western world. He observed that advancement in Connecticut but dismissed it as anything but a temporary phenomenon, partly caused by parasitic trade.
Economic historians (see Robert Fogel and Stanley Engerman’s work) confirm that the Southern slave was generally well treated, for the master wanted to protect his capital. An average slave was worth, and could be sold for, about $1,000 at the time Fitzhugh was writing. (Fitzhugh’s own figure of $700 was an underestimate.) Assuming 2 percent annual inflation, that equates to $23,000 in today’s dollars. Over his lifetime, the average slave got back, in shelter, food, fuel, other maintenance expenses, and some cash, 88 percent of what he produced for his master. His calorie intake was higher than even our current standards. But contra Fitzhugh, the Southern slaves were not lazy and inefficient; they were hard workers who made the large plantations efficient and profitable businesses.
As for the slave-owner, he was not, as Fitzhugh tried to persuade his readers, the “least selfish of men.” Fogel and Engerman calculate that the return on capital on large plantations was 10 percent, the same as the typical return on capital of the most successful New England textile firms. Southern slave owners were efficient businessmen, not disinterested paternalists. Fitzhugh, who was not always perfectly consistent, admitted elsewhere that “motives of self-interest” also animated slave owners.
His general thesis is based on peculiar definitions of liberty and slavery. He takes liberty to mean the absence of any constraint, including those generated by voluntary contracts and non-coercive social institutions. He correctly blames socialists and anarchists for defending this licentious and unworkable “liberty,” but he uses their definition of the term. He also adopts a very wide concept of slavery as encompassing any constraint on the exercise of liberty. Since slavery in this very wide sense is defensible, while unconstrained liberty is not, he concludes that slavery in the strict sense—the perpetual appropriation of another person’s body—is also desirable, which is a non sequitur if ever there was one. He chose his fuzzy definitions to make his analysis possible and to lead directly to his conclusions.
Catalog of economic errors / Fitzhugh had no idea of how free markets work. It is true that competitive workers bid down wages until all can find jobs. But it is also true—and completely ignored by Fitzhugh—that competitive employers bid up wages until exploitation is reduced to zero. It is for this very reason that the standard of living of Connecticut workers in Fitzhugh’s day was high and rising. But he did not build on his observation of the free workers’ standard of living, either because he did not have a theory capable of incorporating it or because he was more a pamphleteer and a propagandist than a scholar.
He apparently had no idea of the normative values that economists naturally entertain when they leave the domain of purely positive analysis. Consider his argument about slaves as well-maintained property. The master who owns his slave’s human capital will of course take better care of that capital than if it were owned by no one. But the individual who owns his own human capital also has plenty of incentive to take care of it. He knows what’s good for himself and will use, or invest in, his human capital in a way to maximize his own utility given his own preferences. Fitzhugh was able to claim that the free worker’s human capital would be neglected only by negating individual preferences and paternalistically assuming that the master knew better than the slave what was good for the latter.
In this viewpoint, Fitzhugh was not unique. Most justifications of power, whether from the left or right, rely on paternalism and the negation of individual preferences. But Fitzhugh was more openly coherent. He also pushed what we would today call cost-benefit analysis to its limit. At the end of Cannibals All!, he asked if it would not be better, in case of a surplus of slave labor, to kill the surplus slaves instead of setting them free. The latter solution, he explained, would not only condemn the freedmen to starvation, but would also push down wages for other free workers. In other words, the cost of setting slaves free would be higher than its benefits.
Do capitalists exploit workers? A positive answer implies adopting the labor theory of value: the idea that all value is created by labor. As many 19th-century economists already knew, production also requires capital (tools, machines, buildings, other equipment), which is not totally traceable to labor. The capitalists bring a contribution by forgoing consumption in order to accumulate capital, which has its own productivity. The capitalists’ remuneration is thus not stolen from labor. Moreover, labor is not homogeneous: are managers and executives also exploited? Finally, consumer preferences also contribute to creating value.
If we accept that an individual is best positioned to know what brings him the most utility, any act of exchange creates benefits for all parties to the exchange, compared to a situation where exchange had not occurred. Otherwise, at least one of the parties would have declined the exchange. So we know that a worker who accepts a job—who exchanges his labor for a remuneration—benefits. Economists call this the benefits of exchange. The owners of capital also benefit, of course, but they can’t expropriate the workers’ own contribution. The same reasoning does not apply to the slave, who is forced to accept whatever his owner pays him and does not benefit from the competition of other employers.
Fitzhugh actually believed in a very naive version of the labor theory of value: that one hour of work should always exchange exactly for another hour of work—whatever the value of the thing produced or the nature of the work. He defined any other exchange as exploitation, which condemns virtually all acts of exchange. No surprise that he saw exploitation everywhere, although he had a blind spot for slavery. He should have read Smith and Say.
In his wishful thinking, masters were not subjected to the human nature he so often invoked when decrying capitalism and economic liberty.
Fogel and Engerman estimate that “the average income received by a prime [slave] field hand, including benefits in kind, was roughly 15 percent greater than the income he would have received for his labor as a free agricultural worker.” Does that mean, as Fitzhugh would have it, that the slave was better compensated than the free worker? Of course not. The slave’s freedom was severely restricted, which was a large cost that must be deducted from his real income. Fogel and Engerman find that after the abolition of slavery, large plantations could not survive because they were unable to pay enough to attract free workers. Fitzhugh was not wrong when he claimed that, at least on large plantations, free labor was, for the plantation owner, cheaper than slave labor. But the slave—from the point of view of the slave—received much less if we include the servitude that came with his pay package. He was paid much less in real income (pecuniary income minus lost utility from enslavement) than a free worker. Free labor would have demanded much more than the 15 percent premium in return for doing slaves’ work on large plantations.
Economic freedom is efficient precisely because it allows every individual to express his own preferences without an outside owner overriding them. All individuals are free to express their preferences in their market transactions and, because competition is free, nobody is normally under the domination of only one buyer or seller. The slave, on the contrary, cannot partake in this efficiency and is necessarily exploited by his monopolistic master. The threat of the whip partly replaces economic incentives. At the time Fitzhugh was writing, people were poor compared to today, but the efficiency of liberty had already multiplied the incomes of free workers.
Fitzhugh claimed that free individuals are economic cannibals, and that the weaker ones end up being dominated and exploited just like slaves but without the benefit of a protective master. In his wishful thinking, masters were not subjected to the human nature that he so often invoked when decrying capitalism and economic liberty. In reality, masters could cannibalize their slaves much better in the absence of competition from other employers (and in the absence of an easy escape to the North or West). And Fitzhugh did not see that “cannibalism” better characterized the more powerful government he desired.
Conservatism and socialism /Fitzhugh’s intellectual construction is very fragile and ultimately rests on the double assumption that free markets don’t work in the interest of their participants, and that political government is a master as benevolent as parents toward their children. Sociology for the South and Cannibals All! brew a strange mixture of socialism and conservatism. “Extremes meet,” he notes. Authoritarian power is the common denominator.
That all individuals are slaves to society fits well with a socialist ideology stripped of its millenarianist hopes. Fitzhugh concurred with the socialists “that free competition is the bane of modern society,” and “that it is right and necessary to establish in some modified degree, a community of property.” “We agree with them,” he explained, “in the end they propose to attain, and only differ as to the means.”
Fitzhugh was also a conservative. Things must not change. The epigraph of Sociology for the South is taken from Ecclesiastes: “The thing that has been, it is that which shall be; and that which is done is that which shall be done; and there is no new thing under the sun.”
But what to conserve? Often, conservatives want to conserve what is, but only if it fits precisely what should be. Fitzhugh thought that the South was as it should be, but he was pushing for still more authoritarianism (in the form of protectionism, for example).
Things did change, in the North as well as the South, with the federal power grab that accompanied and followed the Civil War, as shown by Jeffrey Hummel in Emancipating the Slaves, Enslaving Free Men. In a sense, Fitzhugh got his wishes:
More of despotic discretion, and less of Law, is what the world wants.… A constitution, strictly construed, is absolutely inconsistent with permanent national existence.
Racists like Fitzhugh were completely defeated by the abolition of slavery. Fogel and Engerman note:
What antislavery critics generally objected to was not the fact that slavery constrained the opportunities open to the blacks, but the form which these constraints took. While physical force was unacceptable, legal restrictions were not. Thus many one-time crusaders against slavery sat idly by, or even collaborated in passing various laws which serve to improve the economic position of whites at the expense of blacks. Licensure laws helped to squeeze blacks out of some crafts. Educational restrictions helped to exclude them from others. Meanwhile, taxation and fiscal policies were used to transfer income from blacks to whites, perhaps more effectively, certainly more elegantly, than had been possible under slavery.
One could argue that there is not much to learn in Fitzhugh’s books, except for a catalog of economic errors and a testimony in economic and intellectual history. But they offer much of interest in those areas. And nearly every page, especially perhaps in Sociology for the South, contains an unforgettable aphorism illustrating the absurdity of authoritarianism. All in all, the two books are well worth reading.
Readings
- Ante-Bellum: Writings of George Fitzhugh and Hinton Rowan Helper on Slavery, edited by Harvey Wish. G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1980.
- Emancipating Slaves, Enslaving Free Men, by Jeffrey Rogers Hummel. Open Court, 1996.
- Time on the Cross: The Economics of Negro Slavery, Vols. 1 & 2, by Robert William Fogel and Stanley L. Engerman. Little, Brown, 1974.
