The Rise and Fall of Society

194 Pages·2007·12.61 MB·English

by  Frank Chodorov

The Rise and Fall
of Society
Also by Frank Chodorov:
THE INCOME TAX: Root of All Evil
ONE IS A CROWD: Reflections of an Individualist
The Rise and
Fall of Society
An Essay on the Economic Forces
That Underlie Social Institutions
FRANK CHODOROV
THE DEVIN-ADAIR COMPANY
NEW YORK, 1959
Copyright 1959 by Frank Chodorov.
All rights reserved. No portion
of this book may be reproduced in
any form without written permis-
sion from the publisher, The Devin-
Adair Company, New York 10, except
by a reviewer, who may quote brief
passages in connection with a review.
Canadian agents: Thomas Nelson ò- Sons, Ltd., Toronto
Library of Congress Catalog Card No. 59-8205
Manufactured in the United States of America
To Francine
When you are old enough to read this book there will be
a Society and there will be a State, and both will take
their character from the reigning ideas of the times. I
suspect that these ideas, planted in the American mind
before you were born, will be so different from those
expressed in this book that you may have some difficulty
in understanding how your grandfather "got that way."
That could provide you with some good, clean fun—try-
ing to reconstruct a long-lost pattern of thought.

Foreword
IT IS HARD to think of an age which, with less reason,
has been more smugly self-satisfied than ours. The ortho-
doxies of the most solidly established high religious ages,
founded as they were upon a belief in the transcendent
sources of truth, have always been safeguarded by their very
belief in the transcendent from the idolatry of man's wor-
ship of himself and his established habits. The power of
kings and the pride of prelates remained intrinsically limited
by the common acceptance of truths to which all men were
subject. So when abuses proliferated and prophets arose to
condemn the growth of power and the distortion of dogma,
though their way was hard, they could appeal to funda-
mental beliefs to which everyone adhered.
But in our society, where relativism rules supreme, where
truth is not merely distorted but its very existence denied,
power grows to monstrous proportions without any inner
check in the bosoms of those who hold it. In place of truth,
the ideal is adjustment, that is, the acceptance of whatever
happen to be the modes of thought and action established
among us—not because it is purported that they are true,
but just because they are. In this paradise for power un-
VII
FOREWORD
checked by any criterion but its own, the way of the man
who would bear witness to and fight for truth because it is
truth is doubly hard. Not only, as in former ages, must he
confront the established authorities of the day with the
divergence of their acts from the demands of truth; he has
to substantiate—explicitly or implicitly—the very title of
truth as criterion.
This is the road Frank Chodorov has chosen. As essayist
and as editor, on the lecture platform and in his personal
influence upon those around him, he has devoted himself to
a single end: to bear witness against that worship of the
collective which is the omnipresent political error of the
20th century, and to vindicate the primary value of the in-
dividual person as the foundation from which all political
thought and action derives its meaning.
His firm defense of the value of the individual person is
in turn based upon his insistence on the validity of objective
truth, of the Natural Law as source and criterion of right and
wrong in the relations among men. This, in the atmosphere
of the day, is adding insult to injury. Not content with at-
tacking the dominant contemporary assumption that the
collective "people," as represented by the state, is the moral
center of human existence, infinitely superior to any mere
individual person, he strikes at the same time at the positiv-
ism and the pragmatism that have made it possible for this
assumption to take root and grow.
Frank Chodorov has devoted the whole of his mature life
to a struggle against the twin perversions of concentrated
power in the state and intellectual irresponsibility in the
academy. As editor of The Freeman, Analysis, and Human
Events, in his multifarious writings and speeches, in his
books—One Is a Crowd and The Income Tax: Root of All
viii
FOREWORD
Evil—he has never ceased to hammer away at his essential
theme: the danger of concentrated power to the freedom of
individual human beings. One does not have to agree with
him on every aspect of his analysis, or with all his proposals,
to recognize that his voice is one of the few clear voices of
freedom speaking today. He has truly something of the
prophet about him—not the hortatory prophet, but the quiet
speaker of parables.
Now in his seventies, he gives us in this book a vigorous
and compelling epitome of his beliefs. The sentence with
which it ends, "The will for freedom comes before freedom,"
reflects his purpose and underlines his achievement. For to
the re-awakening of the will to freedom and the understand-
ing of freedom, Frank Chodorov has contributed mightily.
FRANK S. MEYER