The Utopian Fantasies of Central Planners

Illiberal Delusions that Disfigured the Modern World

There is much in the modern world to delight Julian West when he awakes in Boston in the year 2000 after a 113-year sleep.

He marvels at a primitive version of the internet that pipes a selection of music into the home around the clock. Merchandise, ordered from a warehouse, is delivered swiftly to the door, paid for with an American credit card that is “just as good in Europe as American gold used to be”.[1]

West, the central figure in Edward Bellamy’s 1889 utopian fantasy Looking Backwards, finds Boston to be an opulent and spacious city at the dawn of the twenty-first century. Latter-day Bostonians appear to want for nothing in this communitarian, egalitarian nirvana. The fear of hunger no longer plagues them, neither are they driven by the accumulation of private wealth. Consequently, Bellamy postulates, the city is remarkably free of conflict; its citizens have no need for lawyers since crime has all but disappeared. The little delinquency that remains is treated as pathology. Civil disputes are unheard of in this ordered and peaceful polis.

The contrast with the dirty and disordered nineteenth-century city from which West departed is stark. Nevertheless our time traveller is unsettled. “The idea of such an extension of government is, to say the least, rather overwhelming,” West tells his host, Dr Leete. “In my day it was considered that the proper functions of government, strictly speaking, were limited to the peace and defending the people against the public enemy, that is, to military and police powers.”[2]

In Looking Backwards we recognise an early manifestation of the intellectual infatuation with collectivism. It would lodge in the minds of the fin-de-siècle intelligentsia and would be bequeathed by their successors. Bellamy’s extraordinarily successful novel was published barely two decades after the publication of J.S. Mill’s On Liberty, yet its inversion of the liberal idea illustrates a deepening cultural confusion. In Looking Backwards individual liberty is threatened not by the state but by the concentration of capital and the growth of the corporation. The state is the guardian of freedom and the protector against an “excessive individualism … inconsistent with much public spirit”.

Science was on a roll at the time of the novel’s publication, vastly improving the metropolitan lifestyle. Progress in epidemiology had tamed the parasitic micro-organism Vibrio cholerae and engineers were retrofitting cities with sewers in the virtuous pursuit of hygiene. From Boston to Berlin, the zeitgeist was now turning its attention to social hygiene, demanding scientific remedies for human frailty. Through modern planning, the cheek-by-jowl contrast of wealth and poverty, the debauchery of an urban underclass and the growth in crime might be controlled. Thus arose the conditions for the rise of technocracy and the anointing of an expert class that would rise to become the clerisy of the twentieth century.

Bellamy’s great delusion—that a benign, omniscient government would knock the rough edges off capitalism and liberate its citizens—is arguably the worst idea to lodge in the minds of the intelligentsia in the modern era. Waves of millenarian panic overwhelmed their thinking for decades at a time. The imminent implosion of capitalism and democratic dysfunction became an anxiety that could never quite be shaken off. At times, a genuine fear of crisis was to justify extraordinary measures, creating a moral vacuum in which pernicious ideologies would fester. The delusions that emerged took various forms, but oligarchy was common to all.

Looking Backwards displays a naive fascination with the scientific state that appears not be driven by any particular dogma. It is a work of pure fiction, not a manifesto, and yet the book gripped the imagination of the time, spawning a political movement. It sold well in translation; it proved to be a particular success in Germany, where Bellamy had lived for some time. Remnants of the novel’s ideas are found in Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal. Its cradle-to-grave compassion was the idea that became embodied in the welfare state. It found material form in the concretopias of Europe and America, developments based upon the soulless idea that homes and hearths were merely machines for living[3] that could be mass-produced, stripped of ornamentation, all straight lines and right-angled corners.

As the novel progresses, we recognise the rudiments of Soviet-style socialism; the command economy, nationalisation of industry, and the image of a single shop in the neighbourhood with no merchandise on display, containing all the goods produced in the country. Then, on page 354, the contemporary reader receives a jolt as the true nature of the imagined state is revealed. This is not the dystopia of Das Kapital but the wretchedness of Mein Kampf. “The Labor parties, as such, never could have accomplished anything on a large or permanent scale,” Bellamy writes, “their basis as merely class organizations was too narrow.”

It required a national party, not a workers’ party, to establish a new order and “to realise the idea of a nation with a completeness never before conceived”, in which citizens were as members of:

a family, a vital union, a common life, a mighty heaven-touching tree whose leaves are its people, fed from its veins, and feeding it in turn. The most patriotic of all possible parties, it sought to justify patriotism and raise it from an instinct to a rational devotion, by making the native land truly a father land, a father who kept the people alive and was not merely an idol for which they were expected to die.[4]

Fatherland. A word that chills the modern reader appears in casual form. Now we’re getting Bellamy’s drift; Looking Backwards is the story of a race evolving on Darwinian lines, a people who see themselves as physically, intellectually and morally superior to their ancestors. The laws of natural selection could take their course since—in an age of universal education, where social rank and wealth had been equalised—sexual magnetism was the only reason to marry. As the ever-patient Dr Leete explains:

For the first time in human history the principle of sexual selection, with its tendency to preserve and transmit the better types of race, and inferior typed drop out, has unhindered operation …

Every generation is sifted through a little finer mesh than the last. The attributes that human nature admires are preserved; those that repel it are left behind …

Perhaps more important than any of the causes I mentioned then tending to race purification has been the effect of untrammelled sexual selection upon the quality of two or three successive generations. I believe that when you have made a fuller study of our people you will find in them not only a physical, but a mental and moral improvement … not only is one of the great laws of nature now freely working out the salvation of the race, but a profound moral sentiment has come to its support.[5]

The roots of American eugenic thought with its fear of race degeneracy are apparent in Bellamy’s story. Improved social circumstances have made crime largely redundant; the few atavistic criminals who remain are treated in hospital. In a society freed from want, there can be no rational motive for felony. Criminality “can only be explained as the outcropping of ancestral traits”.

Panic took hold in the polite American imagination towards the end of the nineteenth century, driven by fears of a degenerate underclass whose loose morals and absence of self-restraint would lead to excessive and indiscriminate copulation. Negative eugenics—the notion that drastic steps were justified to avoid the gradual degradation of the race—was a mainstream preoccupation, breeding deeply illiberal thoughts in the minds of early progressives. Sociology’s duty was to devote its principal energies to limiting the reproduction of the unfit, argued Henry Dwight Chapin in Popular Science Monthly: “A permanent quarantine should be applied to all tramps, cranks, and generally worthless beings.”[6]

Delinquents, it was claimed, could be recognised by their physical features. Henry M. Boies, a member of Pennsylvania’s Committee on Lunacy, offered clues to their identification: “human deformities and monstrosities, ill-shapen, weak and sickly, with irregular features. They bear a sinister, ignoble, and furtive expression.”[7]

The moral justification for the forced sterilisation of the feeble-minded became a watershed for liberalism. President Theodore Roosevelt wrote:

I wish very much that the wrong people could be prevented entirely from breeding, and when the evil nature of these people is sufficiently flagrant this should be done. Criminals should be sterilized, and feeble-minded persons yet forbidden to leave offspring behind them.[8]

Roosevelt was articulating the accepted wisdom of his day. Laws permitting the compulsory sterilisation of feeble-minded and insane criminals, chiefly recidivists, were passed in fourteen American states and in Alberta, Canada. Moral degenerates and sexual perverts could be sterilised in eleven states. In California alone a total of 6787 such operations had been performed by January 1930.[9]

The runaway popularity of Looking Backwards and its considerable influence on intellectual and political life is cheerfully forgotten, and understandably so. An honest reappraisal would place the twenty-first-century progressive in uncomfortable proximity with an ugly strand of illiberal thinking they would rather disown. The myth that fascism was an ideology of the extreme Right, as far removed from centre-Left thinking as you could imagine, is a convenient fiction that has allowed progressives to retain a semblance of historical respectability.

Yet this sanitised view of history defies the facts. In Italy, Mussolini’s shock troops, the squadristi, were drawn from the educated middle classes. They were landowners, entrepreneurs, professionals, civil servants, white-collar workers, students and the self-employed. In a study of squadristi in Bologna and Florence, less than 5 per cent could be classified as working class, more than a quarter were enrolled at university, and 17 per cent at secondary school.[10] Hitler rose to power with the widespread support of the middle classes and the intellectuals. The list of Western luminaries who provided intellectual support to “the German experiment” before the outbreak of war is long: Marie Stopes, Wyndham Lewis and Douglas Reed to list but a few. Six weeks after the outbreak of the war, Manning Clark wrote of Germany, “My emotional sympathies are with them in this tortured struggle.”[11] In the assessment of John Carey, “the tragedy of Mein Kampf is that it is not, in many respects, a deviant work but one rooted in the European intellectual orthodoxy”.[12]

We do not know if Hitler read Looking Backwards, but circumstantial evidence suggests it is likely that he did. The book was popular among German intellectuals of his generation. Ideological parallels and rhetorical coincidences suggest national socialists took its message to heart. The conscription of an industrial army to run production on military lines in Germany, for instance, followed Bellamy’s blueprint to the letter. Dr Leete explains to West:

Industry of whatever sort is no longer self-service, but service to the nation, patriotism, passion for humanity … The army of industry is an army, not alone by virtue of its perfect organization, but by reason also of the ardour of self-devotion which animates its members.[13]

At Nuremberg in 1936, forty-seven years after the publication of Looking Backwards, Hitler greeted the German Labour Corps:

You represent a great idea, and we know for millions of our fellow followers the concept of labour will no longer be a dividing factor by one of unification and that no longer will there be anybody in Germany who will regard manual labour less highly than any other form of work.[14]

The national organisation of labour is an extension of the cultural cringe that continues to plague progressive intellectuals: deference to the superior wisdom of central planners. Bellamy sees no threat to good order by handing over total responsibility for economic regulation and the ownership of industry to the state. Indeed in his utopian dreaming, state control is the only cure for labour unrest, inefficiency and the tyranny of boom and bust.

A competitive economy was wasteful and inefficient, maintains Dr Leete. It was industry’s inability to anticipate demand that led to gluts and misdirected effort; corporations lacked the capacity to command a general view of the industrial field; there was duplication from competition, waste from business panics, and crisis through bankruptcy.[15] Leete says:

Their system of unorganized and antagonistic industries was as absurd economically as it was morally abominable. Selfishness was their only science, and in industrial production, selfishness is suicide. Competition, which is the instinct of selfishness, is another word for dissipation of energy.[16]

The modern industrial system of national control of interlocking processes, on the other hand, was far more productive. Each citizen is allocated an equal sum sufficient for their needs in a debit account from which they can draw on a card. Leete says:

The broad shoulders of the nation bear now like a feather the burden that broke the backs of the women of your day … the right of a man to maintenance at the nation’s table depends on the fact that he is a man, and not on the amount of health and strength he may have, so long as he does his best.[17]

West, however, worries that the system “does not encourage saving habits on the part of citizens”. Leete replies:

The nation is rich, and does not wish the people to deprive themselves of any good thing … No man any more has any care for the morrow, either for himself or his children, for the nation guarantees the nurture, education, and comfortable maintenance of every citizen, from the cradle to the grave.

West is incredulous: “That is a sweeping guarantee!”[18] Wealth distribution was one thing; wealth creation was quite another. In Bellamy’s projection of modern Boston, there is plenty to go round. West complains that if he attempted to explain the scale of the wealth apparent in Boston in 2000, his nineteenth-century friends would have told him he was dreaming:

To support the whole nation at a rate of comfort, and even luxury, such as I see around me, must involve vastly greater wealth than the nation produced in my day … In my day, I know that the total annual product of the nation, although it might have been divided with absolute equality, would not have come to more than three or four hundred dollars per head … How is it that you have so much more?[19]

Leete explains the magic formula that enabled the creation of a wealthy, debt-free state-run economy. Prosperity had been achieved through efficiency, full employment and the reduction of spending on unnecessary tasks, like maintaining a military force, collecting taxes and hiring lawyers, a profession that is now entirely redundant.

The producers of the nineteenth century were not, like ours, working together for the maintenance of the community, but each solely for his own maintenance at the expense of the community. If, in working to this end, they at the same time increased the aggregate wealth, that was merely incidental.[20]

Bellamy’s acceptance of the theoretical superiority of a command economy seems ridiculous to the post-Soviet reader. Bellamy’s faith, however, is not grounded in political ideology but in faith in modern scientific statecraft. He has confidence in “the functionaries in Washington to whom it is trusted”—the prototype of the twentieth-century technocrat. “The machine they direct is indeed a vast one, but so logical in its principles and direct and simple in its workings, that it all but runs itself,” Leete assures his guest.

Central control is not easy; it requires laborious stock control systems and reliable estimates of future demand. “Every pin which is given out from a national warehouse is recorded.”[21] Price controls ensure that revenue reflects the cost of production while smoothing out variations in supply. A nineteenth-century entrepreneur was obliged to maintain “sleepless vigilance against fluctuations of the market, the machinations of his rivals and the failure of his debtors”, says Leete. By comparison, “the group of men in Washington who, nowadays, direct the industries of an entire nation” had a much simpler task. “All this merely shows, my dear fellow, how much easier it is to do things the right way than the wrong.”

The novel had an immediate impact when it was published, becoming the third-best seller of its day after Uncle Tom’s Cabin and Ben-Hur. Clubs sprang up across the country to attempt to put its ideas into practice. It spawned a large number of similar works, including parodies and satires. William Morris’s 1890 utopia News from Nowhere was a reaction to Bellamy. H.G. Wells’s When the Sleeper Wakes (1910) and Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (1932) are dystopian versions of the same genre. Bellamy’s principles are also reflected in the American Pledge of Allegiance, which is recited in public schools: “I pledge allegiance to my Flag and the republic for which it stands, one nation indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.” The author of the pledge was Francis Bellamy, Edward Bellamy’s cousin,

The statist philosophy of Looking Backwards with its micromanagement of the economy shines through Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal. The Tennessee Valley Authority, chaired by Bellamy acolyte and biographer Arthur Morgan, “had a utopian feel to it”, wrote Amity Shlaes:

It would create new towns. The most important of these, at Cove Creek, was approved at a meeting of the TVA board in the summer of 1933. It would be a model community; someone attending the meeting suggested that an appropriate name would be New Deal, Tennessee. But the board decided that the town, like the dam, should be called Norris.[22]

Norris stands today as a monument to Bellamy’s utopian dreams; an American version of the garden city idea that had taken hold in Britain at the turn of century. Like Ebenezer Howard, the founder of the British garden cities movement, Bellamy believed that criminals were, to a large measure, the product of their environment. Poor social and physical conditions, rather than poor breeding, was at the heart of their pathology, fuelling the optimistic assumption that engineering the environment could put a stop to aberrant behaviour.

Eleven years before Looking Backwards, sociologist Richard Dugdale had published an influential study of an extended family of criminals he named the Jukes, a disreputable tribe so despised by the law-abiding community that their family name had come to be used generically as a term of reproach.[23] “Fornication, either consanguineous or not, is the backbone of their habits,” wrote Dugdale, “flanked on one side by pauperism, on the other by crime.” The Jukes lived on the urban fringe “in log or stone houses similar to slave-hovels, all ages, sexes, relations and strangers ‘bunking’ indiscriminately … hot-beds where human maggots are spawned.”[24] Yet Dugdale hopes for redemption through the erection of houses with separated sleeping quarters, an arrangement conducive to chastity in which “the mental attributes will gradually develop, aesthetic tastes take the place of debauchery and a new social equilibrium be established”.

Bellamy shares Dugdale’s redemptive faith in architectural determinism. The construction of spacious cities, with public housing, greenery and grand public spaces, would cleanse society of the degeneracy incubated in the putrid slums. We are reminded of how bad things used to be towards the end of Looking Backwards, when West is transported in a dream to the South Cove tenement district in the city he had left behind. He sees:

hopeless-faced women deformed by hardship … while from the windows leered girls with brows of brass. Like the starving bands of mongrel curs that infest the streets of Moslem towns, swarms of half-clad brutalized children filled the air with shrieks and curses as they fought and tumbled among the garbage that littered the courtyards.[25]

West’s description of the new Boston, in which the old city appeared to have been demolished and rebuilt from scratch, cleansed of crime and pauperism, exudes faith in the restorative powers of social hygiene that was to motivate the garden city movement:

At my feet lay a great city. Miles of broad streets, shaded by trees and lined with fine buildings, for the most part not in continuous blocks but set in larger or smaller enclosures, stretched in every direction. Every quarter contained large open squares filled with trees, among which statues glistened and fountains flashed in the late afternoon sun. Public buildings of colossal size and an architectural grandeur unparalleled in my day raised their stately piles on every side. Surely I had never seen this city, nor one comparable with it, before.[26]

The vision of a planned metropolitan utopia was to grip the imagination of twentieth-century social engineers. It was the conceit that inspired Australia’s bush capital, though it was Canberra’s good fortune to be conceived before European modernism colonised the Western architectural mind. If Canberra had been born thirty years later, it would inevitably have been a more brutal place, a ville radieuse rather than a garden city. Both variations of the modernist dream, however, were founded on hubris; technocratic planning and modern architecture, working in harness, freed from bourgeois affectation, could build heaven on earth. As revolutionary fervour gripped the intelligentsia in the aftermath of the First World War, Le Corbusier produced the manifesto for the way ahead:

It is time that we should repudiate the existing lay-out of our towns, in which the congestion of buildings grows greater, interlaced by narrow streets full of noise, petrol fumes and dust; and where on each storey the windows open wide on to this foul confusion.

A great epoch has begun. There exists a new spirit … Industry on the grand scale must occupy itself with building and establish the elements of the house on a mass-production basis.[27]

The “grand scale” that Le Corbusier advocated could be achieved only through the instruments of government, and it was thus that the state began to assume responsibility for the domestic arrangements of its citizens. In Germany, Article 155 of the Weimar constitution pledged to provide “a healthy dwelling” for all.[28] It found concrete form in the movement for New Objectivity—Neue Sachlichkeit—that reshaped many German cities after the First World War. Its hallmark was the vaulting ambition to build a new face for modern Germany. Its prototype was the Deutscher Werkbund (German Association of Craftsmen) exhibition held in Stuttgart in 1927.

In Britain, state-sponsored garden cities were pursuing the same idea in a gentler form. The council housing estates of the 1930s were largely constructed on traditional lines. Yet regardless of architectural form, centrally planned housing assumed an illiberal form. In The Road to Wigan Pier George Orwell noted the illiberal tendencies of planned social housing, even as he railed against the squalor endured by the urban poor:

It is a great achievement to get slum-dwellers into decent houses, but it is unfortunate that, owing to the peculiar temper of our time, it is also considered necessary to rob them of the last vestiges of their liberty … I sometimes think that the price of liberty is not so much eternal vigilance as eternal dirt. There are some Corporation estates in which new tenants are systematically de-loused before being allowed into their houses … it is the kind of thing that makes you wish that the word “hygiene” could be dropped out of the dictionary. Bugs are bad, but a state of affairs in which men will allow themselves to be dipped like sheep is worse.[29]

The council houses Orwell observed in the 1930s, honouring the vernacular tradition of brick, stone and timber, were only the first cautious foray into industrial town planning. Much worse was to come once the mad-eyed technocrats were given licence to indulge their outrageous Le Corbusian fancies in reinforced concrete across postwar urban landscapes from Tower Hamlets to Tbilisi.

In their enthusiasm for an ordered, modern society built on scientific principles, according to a process devised by functionaries, scrupulous in their fairness, and implemented by a benevolent, omnipotent government, Bellamy and his late-nineteenth-century cohort of progressive thinkers lacked the foresight to imagine that the glorious future might be placed in the hands of a maniac like Le Corbusier or the communards of the Bauhaus School. They did not imagine that groupthink could infect the corridors of power, that functionaries were not immune to scientific error, or that institutionalised delusions would mean that mistakes could be repeated over and again.

Failure, like success, has many authors, even if few of them have the courage to own it. Blaming architects alone for the brutal twentieth-century experiments that scarred the urban landscape is to pretend that the lunatics actually run the asylum, while letting their keepers off the hook. It was town planners who gave away the keys to the bulldozers and gave the permission to run amok. It was a disdain for the vernacular perpetrated by these self-styled lords of the jungle that rejected common sense; it was their misplaced faith in central planning that turned architectural mistakes into industrial-scale disasters; it was their self-promotion as an expert class that silenced contrary opinions. Process, systems, order and complexity: those were the ways of the future.

The planners acted, as they almost always do, out of the best of intentions, but their presumption of virtue only made matters worse, hardening their insensitivity to unintended consequences. They were, in their own imaginations, gods among men. They would not just improve the human condition; they would fix it. They would not settle for a better city, they would build the celestial city and its hinterland would be arcadia.

Bellamy’s failure to appreciate the malevolent nature of central planning was not his principal mistake, however. Bellamy’s nirvana is predicated upon a misunderstanding of human nature that ignores the moral dimension of risk. He believes that an expanded government would lift the yoke from its citizens, protect them from selfish corporations, end poverty, level the social landscape and remove uncertainty. He does not entertain the idea that precariousness could be a force for good or that risk may be the spur to human action. He does not consider that eliminating unpredictability would be purgatory, that a world without danger would lead to complacency rather than contentment, that taming the animal spirits of capitalism would stifle innovation and dry up the principal source of wealth. To eliminate risk from everyday life is to deprive humans of their vitality, for we were put on earth to brave failure and overcome obstacles in the constant pursuit of the sublime. Building Valhalla is the business of the gods; the task of humankind is not to save the world, we are called upon merely to contribute. To be deprived of that task, to be content to rely upon a benefactor and not to strive for something better, is to strip human existence of its vitality.

For a succinct reflection on the moribund world Bellamy imagines, it is hard to beat Robert Menzies’s critique of a cradle-to-grave socialist utopia in his 1942 Forgotten People radio essay:

If the motto is to be “Eat, drink and be merry, for tomorrow you will die, and if it chances you don’t die, the State will look after you; but if you don’t eat, drink and be merry, and save, we shall take your savings from you”, then the whole business of life would become foundation-less.

Are you looking forward to a breed of men after the war who will have become boneless wonders? Leaners grow flabby; lifters grow muscles. Men without ambition readily become slaves …

But I do not believe that we shall come out into the overlordship of an all-powerful State on whose benevolence we shall live, spineless and effortless—a State which will dole out bread and ideas with neatly regulated accuracy; where we shall all have our dividend without subscribing our capital; where the Government, that almost deity, will nurse us and rear us and maintain us and pension us and bury us; where we shall all be civil servants, and all presumably, since we are equal, heads of departments.

If the new world is to be a world of men, we must be not pallid and bloodless ghosts, but a community of people whose motto shall be, “To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield”.[30]

The current Prime Minister, Tony Abbott, became partial in Opposition to the metaphor of lifting and leaning, inserting it in speeches and conversation on a number of occasions. It appeared again in May, in the Treasurer’s presentation of his Budget, as part of a patriotic appeal to the community to help improve the nation’s bottom line:

We are a nation of lifters, not leaners.

So tonight, we present you with a budget that delivers a sustainable future for your children, and the generations beyond.

We are a great nation. We are a great people. By everyone making a contribution now, we will build, together, a better Australia.[31]

Today, as in 1942, the language of hard work, and the duty not to shirk, has greater popular appeal than the bien pensant sophisticates imagine. Yet by appealing to Australians to suppress self-interest in the cause of restoring fiscal sanity, Hockey strips Menzies’s rhetoric of its true moral force. Repressing selfish aims for the common good is the very opposite of what Menzies was advocating; indeed, when pursued to its natural conclusion, it becomes the very essence of socialism.

In Looking Backwards, Bellamy trumpets the sublimation of self in favour of the collective as the social and economic breakthrough of the age. Free-market capitalism is presented as a “system of unorganized and antagonistic industries”, that are economically absurd and morally abominable. “Selfishness was their only science, and in industrial production, selfishness is suicide. Competition, which is the instinct of selfishness, is another word for dissipation of energy.”[32]

Mao Zedong attempted to foster communal interest, urging his followers:

oppose the tendency towards selfish departmentalism in which the interests of one’s own unit are looked after to the exclusion of those of others …[33]

Hence, selfishness, slacking, corruption, seeking the limelight, and so on, are most contemptible, while selflessness, working with all one’s energy, whole-hearted devotion to public duty, and quiet hard work will command respect.[34]

By contrast, the moral force of Menzies’s argument in favour of an industrious yeomanry is not devotion to the common good but the licensing of individual aspiration. It is not a condemnation of selfishness, but its celebration. In Menzies estimation, self-interest, or rather the shared interests of a family, is the “motive power of human progress”. The shared goal of national prosperity is achieved, in every practical respect, by human beings who strive not for the good of their neighbour, but for the good of themselves. The national benefit of an industrious citizenry is self-evident, but Menzies reduced his argument to a human scale:

The truth is, as I have endeavoured to show, that frugal people who strive for and obtain the margin above these materially necessary things are the whole foundation of a really active and developing national life. The case for the middle class is the case for a dynamic democracy as against the stagnant one. Stagnant waters are level, and in them the scum rises. Active waters are never level: they toss and tumble and have crests and troughs; but the scientists tell us that they purify themselves in a few hundred yards. That we are all, as human souls, of like value cannot be denied. That each of us should have his chance is and must be the great objective of political and social policy.[35]

We must hope, therefore, that the Abbott government’s first budget is an emergency response, and that its rhetoric is simply a call to arms, a patriotic appeal of the kind that might be employed at the outbreak of war. If Abbott stays true to the philosophy of Menzies, however, and wants to build a foundation for future prosperity, he should start writing his Forgotten People speech, the one delivered after the Battle of Midway, when the path of victory is secure. It is the speech that paints a picture of life after the war, a world in the chance to change one’s life for the better becomes, in Menzies words, “the great objective of political and social policy”.

For Menzies, the supplication to lift rather than lean was not a patriotic call to arms to fight a fiscal battle. It was a moral argument first and foremost with a supplementary economic justification. Citizens should call upon their internal fortitude rather than the assistance of the state not because, in some abstract terms, it reduces the size of government. They should do so because they will feel better about themselves; because a dollar earned is infinitely more valuable than a dollar of charity; because everyone deserves a chance to provide for themselves and their families more lavishly than the richest state can ever hope to do; and because lifters grow muscles and leaners grow flabby.

This is not a discussion in which the heirs to the Liberal tradition need be on the defensive. On the contrary: self-help is an argument that has greater moral force today than the obsolescent cause of welfare. To advocate greater intervention by the state in the business of everyday life is indeed, as the title of Bellamy’s novel suggests, to be caught looking backwards. Today’s circumstances demand that liberals become the real visionaries, delivering a foretaste of a prosperous future that does not rely on the power of government, but on the multiplication of talents and combined energy of an exceptional nation of citizens.

Nick Cater is the author of The Lucky Culture. He is a senior editor at the Australian, and has a blog at www.luckyculture.com.au.