Crisis and Leviathan: Critical Episodes in the Growth of American Government

by Robert Higgs

Book Overview

Few topics are as timely as the growth of government. To understand why government has grown, Robert Higgs asserts, one must understand how it has grown. This book offers a coherent, multi-causal explanation, guided by a novel analytical framework firmly grounded in historical evidence.
More than a study of trends in governmental spending, taxation, and employment, Crisis and Leviathan is a thorough analysis of the actual occasions when and the...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 019505900X
• ISBN13: 9780195059007
• Release Date: January 1987
• Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
• Length: 384 Pages
• Weight: 1.45 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.0" x 6.2" x 9.2"

Customer Reviews

Every Naomi Klein Fan Needs to Read This Book

Naomi Klein's very popular "Shock Doctrine" asserts that governments and free marketers (most notably Milton Friedman) use every crisis imaginable to push through free market reforms that the population opposes. The problem is she gets the whole thing exactly wrong. In the vast majority of cases crises lead to bigger government. Robert Higgs shows how this process has worked in the United States. He terms it the "ratchet effect". Basically government will rapidly expand in a crisis, then after the crisis ends the government will shrink but still be bigger than it was prior to the crisis. As crises cometh and crises goeth the government grows bigger and bigger. Robert Higgs focuses on four episodes in particular. The first being the depression of 1893 which, unlike crisises in the 20th century the government dealt with it by not getting involved despite massive pressure to do so. Then onto World War 1, the Great Depression and World War 2 as well as a brief discussion of the Cold War. In each of these instances the government created massive programs and took extensive control of the economy while launching massive propaganda campaigns to promote these programs. For the most part the Supreme Court was complicit no matter how obvious it was that the constitution was being trampled (despite thankfully declaring some cartelization agencies like the NRA unconstitutional). Yes corporatism and hand outs to politcally connected firms happen by exploiting crises, however this is still big government run amok (who after all is giving these handouts?). And while the likes of Johan Norberg have discredited Naomi Klein's book. The fact that her thesis is not just wrong, but for the most part exactly opposite of the truth needs greater attention. While Crisis and Leviathan is a bit dated, it nevertheless provides a great explanation of how the ratchet effect works and the danger crisises present to liberty. It's especially important now in our current economic crisis.

First rate

Crisis and Leviathan is a hard hitting and imaginative book about the growth of government in the United States throughout the 20th Century. It is this book which has made Higgs into a modern intellectual giant of classical liberalism/libertarianism amongst the likes of Richard Epstein, Murray Rothbard, James Buchanan, Douglas North, Paul Craig Roberts, Walter Block and Hans Hermann-Hoppe. Robert Higgs' Crisis and Leviathan is a lucid and scholarly tract with painstakingly researched references, footnoted and jam packed with nuggets of analysis which may modern historians pass by without a second thought. The reason for this can be easily pointed out. During the 20th century the dominance of functionalist in sociology has swayed many historians to embrace the growth of government as an outcome of civilized society. Therefore they tend to think of the growth of government as an exogenous factor; as if it magically appears out of thin air. Unlike the previous reviewer, I don't think that Higgs' book is just another rehashing of libertarian theory or ideology (If it were we may ask - is this a rewriting of the Libertarian Manifesto by Rothbard or Capitalism and Freedom by Friedman; my answer would be hardly). Higgs is hardly unimaginative; in fact he is a creative thinker with a penchant for understanding history while incorporating economic theory. Anyone who would question this would profit by actually spending some time reading the theoretical section of this book instead of skimming it. Here Higgs demonstrates within a few pages a technically sound method of understanding and interpreting facts of historical value. No one is questioning the originality (Weber or Spencer thought it up before him, for example - do we need to mention Schumpeter, who is mentioned extensively) of his argument, only its application to the growth of government in the United States during the 20th century. (1st - that is the thesis of this book. 2nd - If you don't believe that government did grow - then you need a few more history lessons.) Higgs, unlike the many of his modern conservative contemporaries, thankfully disdains war and like Robert Nisbet carefully shows why the `will-to-power' is so attractive to conservatives who are in a position to abuse it. From this vantage point it is easy to envision Higgs scorn for the dominant ideology, one which has lead to the rise of what he calls participatory fascism. He points out decisively and consistently that each successive crisis during the 20th century has begat questions by the `public' of how the government can and ought to fix the problem and ultimately "do something" to fix it. Under the wave of new legislation, property rights by regulation are eroded concurrently so that its ownership is no longer de facto, yet still de jure. Higgs employs Schumpeter's analysis contained in `Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy' to formulate a similar conclusion to what C. Wright Mills' called (who was not a

Well researched classic

This book is a well researched classic on the horrors of the state. Tediously footnoted and well organized, the book offers the concept of the "ratchet effect"- government taking advantage of (sometimes creating) "crisis" as an excuse to dramatically increase government power, and fails to reverse this after the so called emergency passes. Higgs succeeds at proving his hypothesis beyond any doubt with history backed by many, many sources and does this in a way that is both readable and academic. In today's world, few books could be a more relevant warning about government

More significant now than ever

Robert Higgs presents an interesting and painfully obvious thesis: that government takes advantage of crises in order to grow larger, but then never shrinks to its previous size once the crisis has ended. As a case study, Higgs analyzes the growth of Big Government in the United States - a horrendous story of the degradation of constitutional values and the seemingly inevitable growth of the Leviathan State.The book is more significant now than ever, since its publication in the 1980s. Government has grown substantially, especially the various "wars" on drugs and terror that have greatly increased the size of government and US government involvement in several aspects of domestic life and foreign affairs.The scholarship is particularly good - mountains of empirical evidence, all relevant to his thesis, are well documented and presented concisely in this book. The book is straightforward and easy to understand; it should be accessible to economists and intelligent non-economists alike. If you've wanted to understand how government insidiously (or naturally) becomes larger regardless of constitutional constraints, read this book. It might fill you with rage, but maybe you can put that rage to good use. Are the ideas of limited government destined to be considered a failure in the far future, or can leviathan be chained down? If this is all government is about, in the United States or anywhere, do we really want a government at all?Read this book. Libertarians will consider it a great read and invaluable intellectual ammunition; everyone else should read it, if for nothing else, to better understand the nature of the beast.

Impressive Scholarship

Robert Higgs is a first-rate economist and economic historian who sets out a provocative thesis -- namely, that governments exploit crises (real and fabricated) as excuses to grow and to strip people of their wealth and liberties. Higgs skillfully and carefully tests this thesis against history. The thesis stands. Governments do indeed exploit crises as opportunities to confiscate ever-greater powers. After each crisis, the amount of power recently added to government's stock might shrink somewhat, but very seldom back to what it was prior to the crisis. This is one of the most important and compelling books published during the 1980s.