---

Karl Hess: A Life on the (Right) Left (and Right)

Introduction. Focus of This Paper

Over the past decade or more, I’ve done a considerable number of C4SS studies on particular anarchist thinkers. Since my formal titles at Center for a Stateless Society include Karl Hess Chair of Social Theory, it’s probably well past time to do one on Hess.

Karl Hess’s intellectual career is a long arc from the Old Right through the mid-60s, to the New Left, and back to the right starting in the late 70s or so. In his Old Right phase, he was associated with William F. Buckley in the early days of the National Review, “worked closely with Joe McCarthy” (including writing his speeches), and was also on the staff of the American Enterprise Institute. Working for a union-busting consultant, he wrote pamphlets “exposing any known Communist Party or Communist-line association of anyone involved in a local organizing effort.” He was chief speechwriter for the Goldwater campaign and principle author of the 1960 and 1964 Republican platforms.^[1] In his New Left period he joined the Industrial Workers of the World, had friendly ties with the Black Panthers, and worked at the Institute for Policy Studies. He went on in the 1970s to a prolonged period of involvement in the community and alternative technology movement — an interest that never left him, even after his return to the right.^[2] In the 80s he returned, in his own words, “back to my roots as a classical liberal,” at one point editing a periodical for the Libertarian Party (which had itself, of course, moved considerably to the right since its founding).^[3]

The extent of his shift back to the right in his later years is evidenced by his passionate defense, in retrospect, of McCarthyism. McCarthy, he said “was not… wrong. There was a Communist menace. He helped create the atmosphere in which important parts of it could be exposed.”^[4] It’s also suggested by the fact that Charles Murray — of The Bell Curve fame — wrote the Foreword to his autobiography, and that Hess cited him as his beau ideal (“thinkers of the caliber of Charles Murray”) of a social thinker.^[5]

Surveying his earlier leftist views from the perspective of his 60s, he referred to them as “madness,” repudiating them in the clichéd language of the right-wing commentariat (“politics of envy”),^[6] and dismissing left-wing economic theory in the kind of superficial terms that might have come from a Townhall columnist. For example, his framing of “the labor theory of value in action”:

READ MORE