The “Warmth of Collectivism”?
The toxic allure of the statist vision
At his swearing in as mayor of New York City, Zohran Mamdani declared his intention to “replace the frigidity of rugged individualism with the warmth of collectivism.” Whereas, according to the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), “capitalism pits us against each other” and transforms workplaces into “fundamentally authoritarian” entities, collectivism strives for a world run by the people, for the people.
A member of the DSA, Mamdani’s collectivist vision for NYC involves more stringent rent control laws, more expansive oversight of landlords, city-owned grocery stores, “no-cost” childcare and free bus fares, a minimum wage of $30 by 2030, corporate tax hikes, and more. To hear the mayor of a major American city espousing this vision is disturbing, to say the least.
One doesn’t need to point to the obvious failures of the Soviet Union or the economic tragedies of modern-day Venezuela to establish the negative economic consequences of collectivism. They are apparent in the very problems Mamdani seeks to address. One of his first acts as mayor, he says, will be to intervene to protect tenants of a deteriorating Brooklyn building run by the now-bankrupt Pinnacle Group. The irony is that the units in the building are rent-controlled—hence their deterioration. Doubling down on rent controls and other measures of price-fixing will do nothing to make New York City prosper.
Yet, despite their clear negative economic consequences, the appeal of Mamdani’s collectivist ideas remains. This is because the ideals of collectivism deeply resonate with our moral impulses in a way that the spontaneous orders of the liberal system—sometimes dubbed capitalism—do not.
Why is this the case? A partial answer relates to our pre-civilizational mode of existence. Homo sapiens subsisted for many thousands of years in small, roaming bands of fewer than one hundred people. Band life shaped the moral instincts of our species by inculcating norms of cooperation in service of shared group objectives. A collectivist ethos may well have been selected for in a social-evolutionary sense. Members of groups more attuned to common objectives would have developed superior cooperative skills and dominated—and therefore outbred—other groups.
The collectivist ethos extended throughout the agricultural revolution and into the early centuries of antiquity. In these centuries the clan—and subsequently the city—was commonly taken as the basic social-ontological unit. Odd as it might seem to us today, the “individual,” as we Westerners now understand that concept, had to be invented.
Whatever their ultimate source, our primitive instincts and desires for encompassing group objectives feed contemporary romantic visions like Mamdani’s. We all naturally feel the pull to sink into a warm bath of collectivist ideology. The pull is perhaps especially strong among Gen Z and late Millennials, who rank among the loneliest generations. (The Mamdani campaign in fact capitalized on this loneliness in clever ways by turning campaigning into an opportunity for socialization.)
In today’s warm visions of collectivism, however, it is the coercive apparatus of state, not the band or the extended clan, that is focal. The state is now the embodiment of “us” in the collectivist mind. The state is the vehicle through which our inchoate demand for shared purpose simultaneously finds expression and realization.
Such visions are delusional, dangerous, and entirely inappropriate in the world of commercial modernity. But how does one combat them?
One obvious option is basic political economic analysis. Most collectivist economic proposals are nothing but a veneer of appealing rhetoric. The simple point that there is no such thing as a free lunch—everything has a cost—immediately deflates proposals for “no-cost” childcare and “free” healthcare. “We” can’t will abundance into being.
One might also reiterate the foundational argument of Hayek’s 1945 article “The Use of Knowledge in Society.” Even if we grant the moral desirability of the collectivist vision, we are still forced to admit that collectivist economic schemes cannot outperform liberal systems. The reason is epistemic: markets utilize, create, and communicate knowledge in a manner that cannot possibly be replicated through central planning.
A prime venue for application here, close to the collectivist heart, is healthcare. The myriad problems with the American healthcare system are not a function of market mechanisms run amok, as collectivists often claim, but a consequence of that fact that the system is literally priceless. It lacks any meaningful market prices by which information might be conveyed to incentivize producers and consumers to calibrate their decisions. The result is predictable: perverse incentive structures and widespread inefficiencies.
A second way to stifle yearnings for collectivism is to discuss its historical tendencies toward authoritarianism. One might again channel Hayek, this time invoking the nuanced arguments of The Road to Serfdom. But an elementary point is simply that collectivist zeal has a problematic set of historical correlations with material deprivation, political oppression, and even mass murder. The executions and expropriations of Che Guevara and Fidel Castro, the killing fields of Cambodia, and the Soviet gulags were ostensibly manifestations of the will of “the people.”
It is nice to see the DSA declare that “our vision pushes further than historic social democracy and leaves behind authoritarian visions of socialism in the dustbin of history.” But talk is cheap. How does the DSA plan to concentrate economic power in the hands of “the people” without granting arbitrary coercive powers to the state? The “warmth” of arbitrary expropriations of private property may be a harder sell than free bus rides and childcare.
Yet a third option is to make the case for liberty in a way that appeals to our natural collectivist impulses. Making such a case surely involves economic analysis and historical reasoning—if one wishes to serve the good of “the group,” one surely would want to avoid political arrangements that facilitate economic stagnation and political oppression. But more fundamentally, the case involves casting a vision of the free society that foregrounds community obligations over individual rights and views the latter in service of the former. This kind of vision has a distinguished history amongst classical liberals and conservatives. It was advanced by a founding member of the Mont Pelerin Society, the chemist-turned-philosopher Michael Polanyi.
In a 1941 article called “The Growth of Thought in Society,” Polanyi distinguished between personal freedom and public liberty. The desire for personal freedom is “the desire to be left alone, or to do as you please.” It is perhaps this kind of personal freedom, the demand for which by nature knows no boundaries (which would by definition limit its scope), that Mamdani and other collectivists have in mind when they spout off against “rugged individualism.” Personal freedom, Polanyi pointed out, is the only kind of freedom understood by collectivists. But the liberal view of society entails richer conceptions. Personal freedom is a means to public liberty, “freedom with responsible purpose; a privilege combined with duties, as exacting as any that are shouldered by man.”
The liberal vision of society for Polanyi by no means absolves us of our duties to one another. But the highly dynamic, complex, and context-specific nature of the human problems that call for solution render totalitarian control ineffective. (Here Polanyi’s argument clearly prefigures Hayek; Polanyi in fact used the term “spontaneous order” in print first.) Collectivist political schemes fail to recognize that individuals should, can, and do use their freedoms to solve problems, discover truth, and help their neighbors. True, private freedom is sometimes abused. But its abuse cannot be eliminated without eliminating personal freedom itself, which is an essential ground to advancing the public good:
Liberalism recognises that privacy [personal freedom] is the ground on which—amidst many personal matters—there germinate new ideas, which will eventually benefit the community. Irresponsible privacy, solitary habits, non-conformity and eccentricity are protected by Liberal society, because it sees in these the breeding ground of independent men: much needed for the public good.
Polanyi’s vision may not prove effective in persuading a critical mass of young people of the follies and moral bankruptcies of collectivist politics. But it can at least encourage liberals to strive, in the mode of John Bates Clark, to ensure that collectivism has no monopoly on beatific visions of the good society. Contrary to the accusations of collectivists, classical liberal theory does not neglect the common good. But it understands the common good to be served best in an indirect fashion, as individuals tend to themselves, their close relations, and their local communities. The liberal maintains that we need not choose between the good of the individual and the good of society, for it is precisely by protecting each individual’s right to, as Adam Smith put it, “pursue his own interest his own way,” that we promote the advancement and true prosperity of our civilizational order.
Erik W. Matson is the Gibbons Fellow in Economics at the Catholic University of America and Co-Director of the Adam Smith Program at George Mason University.